Accept Change?

Five years ago, I was sh*t out of luck. It was May, and while most college students had already picked out classes for the fall semester, I was frantically trying to figure out what to do with the next year of my life. I couldn’t return to NYU. I had applied as a transfer student at several schools, but none of them saw my acting experience (vocal gyration 101) as transferable academic credit. The rejection came fairly late in the year for other decisions to be made about school, and so I felt somewhat stuck. My advisors told me to wait a year and apply to several competitive scholarships at NYU that could help me finish my last two years. In the meantime, though, it felt as if I’d be looking down the face of a year spent in the bleachers. All directions felt like defeat: to stay in New York and watch my friends and peers progress a year further in school held little interest.

In a last attempt to free my mental block, my friend Frankie took me to the roof of our apartment for a cigarette break. Staring out at the moonlit Manhattan skyline, Frankie asked me to try something I hadn’t before. Rather than moving forward, which seemed impossible at the time, try moving sideways. His invitation seemed cryptic, and unclear. How could this year be any different than I had wanted it to be? Frustrated, he retorted. “What would you do, if you could do anything right now? Anything??” He climbed back down the fire escape to our apartment and left me to muse with the moon. Anything. The thought came quickly, a momentary burst of clarity. Four months later, my plane landed in Nairobi, Kenya, the start of a life-changing detour to a small village out on the coast.

I’m stuck. I know I have ambition, but it feels replaced by nausea. I have passion, but it feels stifled by exhaustion and limitation. Every corner I turn, I feel met with resistance. Resistance is good; too much is overwhelming. I am a changed person, and that can be tough to acknowledge at times. So I continue to place myself on the same track as those around me. Inevitably, though, I fall behind. How can I keep up right now? I simply don’t have the strength to do it. So I lay on my couch, feeling somewhat defeated and left behind, unable to see the ever-expansive forest for the trees. I wallow in regret, and have a difficult time imagining how the next three years could be any different than what I had originally hoped for.

My uncle recently wrote something in a letter to me, a response to an earlier post. “There is a risk in wanting things to be ‘normal’ that you will return to the unknown causes of the cancer--don't go back, instead go into the change as best you can understand what it is.” Funny part is, I don’t understand the change, but I can sense that I must go into it regardless of knowing it well.

I am looking sideways. I am musing with the moon and contemplating how it could all be profoundly different than first imagined. I am digging for memories of past adventures, waiting anxiously for a somewhat similar spark of ingenuity. And I am sitting with change—messy, uncomfortable—hoping that sometime very soon, we will know each other better.