The Long Way Back to Yourself
I have a birthday coming up, which has me working on a theory.
I don’t think aging is a straight line.
I think it might be a circle.
Or perhaps a spiral, which is less tidy but probably more accurate.
I think we spend the first half of life becoming people, and the second half slowly remembering who we were before we thought we had to become anyone.
I have evidence.
I remember one of my birthdays in Grade One with extraordinary clarity.
It was early fall (as all my birthdays are) and our classroom had a large wooden calendar on the wall. The names of the months slid in and out across the top, and every morning one of us was chosen to put the wooden number for that day into its slot.
Mrs. Macintosh did the weekends.
On my birthday, I got to put in the number.
There is a photograph of me doing it.
Or there was.
I had it for years and now cannot find it, which means there is an excellent chance I put it somewhere safe.
Possibly in an envelope marked IMPORTANT DOCUMENTS.
I can still picture it, though.
Me standing beside the calendar, enormously pleased on the inside. Still a little shy on the outside.
There is a photograph from just a few weeks earlier, on the first day of school, and when I look at that little girl now, I feel something I don’t remember feeling ten or fifteen or twenty years ago.
I recognize her.
Not just her face.
Her.
I feel more like her now than I do the woman I was at forty.
Because apparently, after several decades of personal development, career development, parenting, marriage, divorce, ambition, responsibility, self-improvement and increasingly complicated skincare, I have arrived back at many of the conclusions I reached when I was six.
For example, I still believe a stiff navy-blue poplin dress is an excellent thing to wear on your birthday.
I might skip the white pinafore this time.
But only because I have grown.
I still love September with a devotion that makes no particular sense.
Fresh pencils.
New notebooks.
A clean calendar.
The possibility that this year you will finally become the kind of person who writes neatly in the margins and does not lose important documents.
I still think new shiny shoes can materially improve an otherwise average day.
I would still rather read than do almost anything else.
I am happier with four people around a table than forty people in a room.
I would rather wear a dress than most other things.
And given a patch of dirt, I would rather plant flowers than vegetables.
I understand the argument for vegetables.
Vegetables are useful.
They sustain life.
You can eat them.
Flowers contribute almost nothing to household self-sufficiency and then, after several weeks, die.
Obviously I choose flowers.
The strange thing is that none of this feels nostalgic.
I’m not trying to recreate childhood.
I don’t want to be six again.
Six-year-olds have very little control over their own lives and are routinely expected to eat things simply because an adult has put them on a plate.
What interests me is how many years I spent getting farther away from that little girl before beginning to move back toward her.
At six, you like what you like.
Then the world starts offering feedback.
You discover what is cool.
What is sophisticated.
What successful people wear.
What interesting people read.
What grown women are supposed to enjoy.
You learn to go to the cocktail party.
You learn to network.
You learn to make conversation with someone you have absolutely no desire to know but who might, in some future scenario, be Professionally Useful.
You buy proper shoes for occasions you do not enjoy attending.
You learn that vegetables are admirable.
You become very accomplished at liking things on purpose.
I was quite good at this.
Most of us are.
There are decades when becoming an adult seems to involve adding layers.
Competence.
Taste.
Ambition.
Responsibility.
Professionalism.
A willingness to stand in a crowded room holding a glass of warm white wine and ask, “And what do you do?”
Then something seems to happen in midlife.
You begin taking things off.
Expectations.
Obligations.
Performances.
Things you agreed to like because everyone else appeared to.
You say no to the large dinner and yes to the small one.
You stop buying shoes that hurt.
You admit you don’t particularly enjoy networking.
You plant the flowers.
Maybe we spend the first half of our lives moving outward, collecting identities and experiences and expectations.
And then, if we’re lucky, we begin moving inward again.
Not backward.
Inward.
Toward the things that were true before we knew enough to edit them.
At six, I didn’t need a theory about why I preferred a small group of people.
I just did.
I didn’t need to justify wanting the dress.
I wanted the dress.
I didn’t need gardening to be productive.
Flowers were pretty.
Case closed.
There is a luxury in returning to that level of certainty.
Of course, I have picked up a few things along the way.
Six-year-old me did not have strong opinions about olive oil, good sheets or restaurant acoustics.
She did not know how to parallel park.
She had never experienced the particular pleasure of cancelling plans.
And she did not yet understand that the correct number of throw pillows is fewer than the number sold in stores.
So no, I haven’t returned exactly to where I started.
Maybe aging isn’t a circle after all.
Maybe it is a spiral.
You come around to roughly the same place, only carrying everything you learned on the way.
My birthday is coming again.
I wish I could find that photograph.
Six-year-old me standing beside Mrs. Macintosh’s wooden calendar, putting her own birthday into September.
Navy dress.
Shiny shoes.
A whole school year ahead of her.
I remember her so clearly.
Lately, I think I recognize her, too.
~ Danielle