Hello beautiful human,
This morning the younger packed up and headed up the road back to college. I’m taking a day for the feels.
And what I’m feeling is, 19 is so young. So so young. Why do we put pressure on these young people to figure out their lives when honestly I’m still figuring it out now? Smell the roses. Stay up late doing nothing and feeling everything. Experiment, explore. Don’t worry so much about the future it’s going to find you one way or another.
When I was 19, I had a friend who decided she wanted to be a writer. We all felt we needed to figure out who we were and what we wanted to do. I don’t think I’d quite yet landed on being a writer myself, but my mother is a writer, I’d grown up with parents who knew writers, read writers, talked about writing, so it wasn’t a stretch for me to imagine my friend embracing that life.
It was a stretch for her father, I guess, because he scoffed at her ambition and said, “What do you have to write about?”
There are moments in every life that define us, moments we don’t see coming. This was one for me. At 19 his question hit me like a truck. I was stunned. Knocked down. Winded. I couldn’t form a response in words, but every fiber in my being knew the wrong-ness of that question. Knew that if a person wanted to be a writer, there was something in them that was already curled deep within, a seed. And it was no one else’s business—not even a parent!— to question, guess or judge what that seed might be or where it might lead. Something in me even then knew that seeds are to be nurtured, not shut down.
Now I’m older and I have more words. If I could go back in time, I would say to that man, “Sir, is it possible that even at 19, your beautiful daughter, this young woman with dreams, ambitions and ideas, might have experiences you can’t guess at? Can you imagine that the very shapes of her dreams might be different at night? Is it possible you might learn something from reading her writing, if you dared?”
My own children are grown and not-yet-grown, in that strange in between time where they aren’t fully fledged but they are very much their own people. I wish they would write, draw, dance, sing, or leave some scrap of something in their wakes, so I could know them better.
And I trust them to tell me what I need to know, in whatever way feels right to them.
xoS
Just breathing with the day, peeps. Just breathing with the day.
Today’s invitation: If there was a seed curled in you, what might it be?
Your attention and time are the true gifts. Thank you. xoS
Wow. That was so beautifully said. It has started me thinking which is exactly what i needed. Thanks.
Thank you.