Mourning The Person I No Longer Am.

Every year since graduation, when I see wide-eyed little 18-year-olds all around me start college, I totally envy them. I get all nostalgic and text old pictures to my college friends with overly emotional hashtags and stuff. 

I have a little habit of re-living the past, wishing for the past, wishing I could change the past. It kind of keeps me living in the past a lot, which takes a lot of attention off of the present.

This year’s pre-college-graduation-nostalgia took me back a little farther than I usually go.

Unlike the average teenager, I never really experienced high school.  

I spent my high school years in a wilderness program and then an all girls boarding school. Thus I missed out on prom, a real high school graduation ceremony, and a lot of other things that probably only seem so glamorous because I didn’t experience them.

Among one of the greatest things that I feel I missed out on was the career I dreamed of. 

In middle school I started seeing a voice coach who had many students on Broadway. 

For many years, I was determined to be one of them.

Going into treatment took the wind out of my sails. Once the young girl who believed she could do anything, I no longer had the energy to really pursue an arts school. 

I applied to only one school; my parents’ alma mater. 

Now 7 years later, something in my heart aches for the life that I could have had.

Maybe I would be deep in an eating disorder, barely paying rent in my one-bedroom apartment in NYC, Surrounded by drugs and the madness of other artists while I tried to find my place in an industry crowded with other hopefuls like myself.

Who knows where it would have led me.

Still, the feeling nags at me. Will I ever rest having known that I never even tried? Did I miss my chance? Who is this person I have become? Where is that girl I used to be? How do I get her back?

I no longer really want to pursue the life of an actress (maybe a few community plays here and there), but I almost feel as if I need closure. I told a good friend the other day that I feel like I am “mourning my acting dream”. But then I realized. I don’t know If it’s the acting dream that I am mourning.

I think that It’s the person that I am mourning.

I am mourning the girl who believed that she could do anything. The girl with a fiery passion that could not be stopped. The girl whose future was full of adventure and unknown.

In so many ways I am still that girl. But I am passionate more like a flame and less like a firework; strong but contained, wiser than before.  My life is bright and beautiful, but not quite as glamorous as I had once imagined. 

I can never go back to being that girl. I know too much. I know now that there is no fairytale. That if I were living that dream I would ache for the cozy house on South 15th Street and the wonderful husband walking beside me. 

Life is mundane speckled with wonderfulness. Can we be okay with that?

Sometimes we have to mourn the dreams we once had, the life we thought we would be living, the person we were when we dreamed it all up. 

What a beautiful person we were then, and a beautiful person we are now.

And so, I no longer am mourning the life I “missed out on”, but the girl who wanted that life. The girl who knew so much  and yet nothing at all. The girl whose decisions both complicated and saved my life. 

She has become the woman that I am today. A woman with different dreams, deeper thoughts, deeper peace. And that cannot be traded, for anything in the world.