I promise to get to the hoarding, I promise, but I need you to go on a little trip with me.
I am a constant contradiction. I am a bird’s nest underground. I am a long, delicate finger on a foot. Or maybe I’m the stubby, ugly toe on a hand.
That’s all too vague, isn’t it? I used to feel that I was a thousand different people to everyone that I knew. Like there were thousands of facets to me but every person only saw one facet at time. Part of joining the Peace Corps for me was the lure of self-discovery. I thought that somehow, being away from everyone and everything would let me refine the person that I was and that I wanted to be.
And you know, it did do that, to an extent.
I am more confidant now in who I am and in what I want then ever before. I refuse to make decisions for anyone else anymore- the choices I make are only for myself. And that’s improvement. That’s something to be proud of, I think.
But, it’s also rather problematic.
It’s problematic because I want ten-thousand things, 5,000 of which are constantly at odds with the other 5,000.
Confused? Let me site some examples: I never want to stop seeing the world, I never want to breathe the same air too long. I want a huge garden, I want therapy for my black thumb. I want an old historic house that I fix myself- and when I can’t fix something in it I want to befriend someone who can- I don’t want to hire anyone, when I don’t know something, I want to be taught. I want to continue to buy flour in 25 or 50 kilo bags. I want to go to grad school for MACRO social work and work on policy change. I want to have a baby. I want to be a business-like woman and wear heels that click down hallways with authority. I want to don an apron and make homemade breads and jams and pickles. I never want to be married. I want to wake up everyday next to someone who loves me.
It’s a lot of ‘I want’ isn’t it? And considering where I live now, and the fact that women here can’t even risk breathing an ‘I want’ in their dreams, all of these wants seem rather spoiled of me.
I used to use this analogy that I built off that saying “When God closes a door, he opens a window.” It’s like the world is full of colored doors, I’d say, and you choose one. You make a choice, and you walk through that door, and it’s closes behind you. And then it ceases to exist. It simply blinks out of existence. And now in front of you are whole different set of colored doors- magenta and robin’s egg blue and polka-dots even. They’re choices you can make. The problem is, you can’t ever go back. You can’t pick the megenta door and then decide you don’t want to do it. You’re stuck with the choices you make.
And so making choices paralyzed me. I was so afraid to lose a door. I didn’t want less choices- I didn’t want to narrow my options.
My time here so far has helped me meld some of my facets together- and erased others all together. I’m no longer worried about what you think of me: I am who I am. Like it, or don’t like- just don’t stand in my way. A lot of those fake facets are gone now, they’ve simply winked out of existence. On a basic level I know who I am, and I know that I am constantly evolving.
And that, my friends, is a wonderful feeling.
So, if you’ve managed the philosophical minefield this far, I imagine you won’t mind if I take it a little further (and if you do mind, please, feel free to bow out now).
I want so much, I want so many different things that I’m like a hoarder. We’ve all seen those TV shows, right? Hoarding in any variety is scary and messy and unkempt and an assault on the senses. But the things is, all my wants are things that are beautiful to me. Things that resonate with me. Things that hum a low E-flat in bottom of my soul.
The thing is, I’m like a hoarder of exclusively glass objects. I have masses and piles and tangles of wants. They clatter and bang and clang together. They shatter against one another.
But when the light hits them, when I open the door on them, when I acknowledge them- they are beautiful. They catch the light.
I don’t worry about missing doors anymore. I don’t worry that I want too much, because not daring to want what to you is beautiful and good and right is criminal. And it’s true that I don’t know how I’m going to make all of these wants happen together- but I’m done saying that it can’t happen, that all of these things together are impossible.
I have the impudence to say that I’m going to do them all.
Or die trying.
