It took four I-need-a-journey-to-find-myself books and a self-realization (I’m sensitive and I’d like to stay that way) to start accepting me for all that I am — full of neurotic tendencies and all. If you aren’t hip to the jive of what I-need-a-journey-to-find-myself books are then let me explain. There is some event, if you will let yourself imagine, that sends the often young, ahem, or young at heart, on a journey of self discovery and the greater meaning of life. Insert rainbows, puppies, kittens and bright shiny objects as a finish line. Begin with divorce, graduation, altercations with parents or a quest for what is happiness; my search was the rediscovery of me. Somewhere I had somehow left me behind Raising Arizona-like I had to search the highway for where I fell off the car.
It was a long winded journey in the world of books. My decent in journey-of-life books started with Into the Wild. Somehow I had skipped the let’s-play-in-the-wilderness-and-live-off-the-land part of my young adult hood. Ok, I didn’t skip it. I thought it was dumb. I thought it was naive. I also thought I had always have a decent job, live in a fabulous apartment, be awesome at life and oh, have good credit. Who’s naive now? It was more moving that I initially gave it credit for. I told people, and continue to, that I read at exactly the point in my life I needed to. Against all odds, you can make things happen for yourself, and on the flip side, even if you take every precaution – sometimes life just fails you.
Now friends, you’d think that this would be inspiring enough to keep me about my wits, find my lost self along the highway, but alas, the journey of books continues! I hit this 60s/70s disillusionment with life and found myself deeply invested, if not overly frustrated with, Walk Across America or how many times I can use the phrase forever friend with out making the reader vomit. Shoot. Now I want to see the world! Walk with everyday man and explore the unknown. I’m dramatic. What can I say? It was worth a shot. I had spent the last summer driving from SF to Chicago. Maybe I’d find myself playing banjo off the side of a mountain. Long shot. I know.
It wasn’t until I was finished with The Geography of Happiness and was already past Italy (thank god) and into India in Eat Pray Love that I A) came to realize I needed to stop reading so many books about travel and B)had some found what I was looking for. There is no answer. Each person kinda of trips and fumbles and finds things out as they can. I lose sight of that a lot. In fact, this post was one I was supposed to have written back in April, but it took me until now to sit down and do it. Partly because of timing, partly because I was embarrassed for having spent the first half the year thinking communal living off the coast of Chile would be divine, but mostly for the fact that I continue to go in-and-out of waves of feeling lost. How could I write a post about a journey of discovery when I every time I find myself I lose it. I decided that I need to write. No matter how lost I feel or frustrated I get, my voice, the one that tells me how strong I am and how I am capable some how deafens the sound of the nasal, mean, and finger-pointing self that calls me a failure.
It took me a long time to see myself sitting on the highway in plain sight playing the harmonica. It is, and will always be about accepting myself. What I can do well, what I don’t do and how I can be me. Whether or not I like that is something I have to get over. Damn it. I really should learn how to play the harmonica.
