Ramblings from a rambler

I found myself thinking this morning about Megan Erickson, a really incredible woman and Peace Corps volunteer that I met in East Africa. She was my age, and conversational/fluent in Swahili, and spoke the local tribal language as well (she was based in Rombo district in Tanzania, about halfway up Mt Kilimanjaro), and she was kind, and funny, and so capable and mature and, well, a woman. I don't feel like I've necessarily earned the title "woman" yet, but this woman definitely had. Maybe that strength of self has something to do with living on your own in a developing country for two years trying to make the world a better place.

It's funny: in a lot of ways, living in London has been harder for me than living in Uganda (though this thought could easily be the result of fuzzy memory.) I do have the sense that I've learned more about myself at LISPA than I did volunteering. But I also think that I felt like I was more myself in Uganda. How does that work, I wonder?

It feels sometimes like the older I get, the more I have to face up to my insecurities. The funny thing is, these insecurities are often ones that I don't remember ever having before. The one that comes up most often is needing to be liked, wanting to be loved. This comes up a lot in my interpersonal relations (especially here, where I wouldn't say that I've found a "best friend" per se, the way I tend to find them in other places and eras [high school, college, Dublin]). It's strange, a year into my friendships with a lot of these people, to still feel that they're largely casual friendships. Especially since I so often desperately want something deeper, more profound. And I often end up feeling like these people are "so much cooler" than me, and feel a little weird around them because I want to be their friend, even though I am their friend, and I'm always playing low status and rarely really just relaxing and genuinely being myself. Speaking to Gemma on the phone the other week, I said, "I think I need to stop trying to find my place in order to find my place." And that's it, really. I need to just be, and have faith, and everything will fall into place.

I realise, too, that I project the image of being enormously self-sufficient and independent a lot of the time (or at least since I moved here.) I'm always running around and doing things, and if I can't find someone to go with, fuck it, I'll go by myself. And there's nothing wrong with that - in fact, I think it's important sometimes to push myself in that way. But it's important, too, that I acknowledge that if I need people in my life to a greater degree, I'm the one who needs to make an effort in that direction, too.

That's another reason it's been so lovely to be living with so many people this summer. I'm surrounded by people all the time, and I love it. I'm an extrovert, what can I say.

The other icky side of the "needing to be liked" thing is that I think that it sometimes stands in the way of my being a good performer - or rather, the best performer I can be. I truly believe that I have the potential to be a great performer, but I can only unleash that potential when I get over myself and ideas of how I should be, and get over other people and ideas of what they think of me. I'll never be able to achieve that true transparency of great performers until I let everything else fall away and just let myself enjoy, and breath, and listen, and be.

Hmm... I'm sensing a pattern here.

This summer has been so great, because it's given me the space to think and absorb these experiences of myself over three continents and 18months. There's nothing particularly ground-breaking or new about these thoughts, but I haven't been able to articulate them all in quite the same way and in the same space before, and I think that's valuable. Not that this is the most articulate self-examination in the world, but that's not the point. This is for me more than anyone.

In this moment, I'm thinking that something else that might be important for me is to stay in London after I graduate. I'll probably change my mind. Most likely more than once. I don't even know if it would even be logistically possible to stay here. But it may not be the time to come back to Minneapolis after just one more year. I get the sense that I still haven't figured out who I am away from that home yet, and I'll need more time to figure it out. But who knows, really? Sometimes I look at all the people I love who are there, and all the amazing art and community and joy that city has to offer and I can't wait to get back and be a part of it all. So I guess I don't know (another recurring theme). Everything is possible. The only thing for it is to wait and see.