It's OKAY To Change Your Mind!

This is a content warning for discussion of eating disorders, childhood trauma, and miscarriage. If any of these are triggering topics, please step away from this essay :)

I'll be the first to admit that I've always had lofty dreams. I'll also concede that I have always been the first person to build an identity around whatever that dream might be. I won't bore you with the semantics of my childhood and go into excruciating detail about how trauma breeds maladaptive daydreaming to illuminate why I think the way I do. Instead, I'll raise you this short essay. 

[in all caps] IT'S OKAY TO CHANGE YOUR MIND (TAKE THAT, SHITTY EX-BOYFRIEND !!)

When I was sixteen, I wanted to be an actress. It was heavily implied by my parents that I wasn't talented or pretty enough to be one. Even after I starved myself to be skinny, fainted in a debate round, and sold my soul to ACT prep to get into NYU Tisch, I released the dream into the wild. At seventeen, I wanted to trapeze through Europe and study creative writing at a UK university, but at the threat of being disowned, I elected to say goodbye to my Russell-Group acceptances to Exeter and Newcastle and sold my soul to the next dream. At eighteen, I committed to CSU Long Beach to study screenwriting. My greatest ambition was to walk the stage at the Oscars with my dad as my plus-one. I wanted to be a budding Hollywood gem but had neither the nepotism nor "next big thing" to pioneer an Academy-nominated screenplay. 

After the COVID-19 pandemic took away my senior prom, graduation, and in-person college, I elected to spend the first year of Zoom University™ online and worked at Starbucks. I applied to Pratt Institute, got in with an amazing scholarship and a perfect score on my portfolio. Everything was coming up aces. I was going to live in Brooklyn, be a barista, and eventually, get a job in book publishing until I paid my dues for a book deal. Perhaps I watched Sandra Bullock's The Proposal too many times, but I digress.

I started transferring my job to a new Starbucks location, applied for housing, and began the process of selling my car to move to the city that never sleeps. I began listening to "Empire State of Mind" so often the song gave me an earworm. Below is the vision board I designed:

Then, everything changed again. Pratt Institute refused to take my transfer credits, leaving me a freshman when I was sitting at 60 units I'd busted my ass for. A small college in Louisville, Kentucky offered me an even bigger scholarship, and my long-distance bestie, Tallie, begged me to move. Knowing I'd be doomed to another depressing year at a community college in my dead-end hometown, I took the plunge and moved thousands of miles from home to a state I'd never even visited. Even as I write this, I'm genuinely floored I did it.

"I'll come home every break, Mom!"

"After this, it's Columbia for grad school! Or Boston U!"

"I'm not gonna stay in Kentucky forever! It's the middle of butt-fuck nowhere."

It was not, in fact, the middle of butt-fuck nowhere. It was a metropolitan area where I got to make a new group of amazing friends. My best friend, Callie, and I quickly began to concoct our next big plan. Move to NYC, work in book publishing, be broke and hot in the city together. We would graduate with honors, do an MFA, and be young and happy.

And then, reader, I got pregnant.

For privacy reasons, I won't divulge everything that happened with a little boy named James. Callie was there for the inconclusive test in the iHop bathroom, there while I cried and said, "I think I'm pregnant." I built another dream in just ten days, one for the baby boy I'd already do anything for. I planned to raise him alone, and while I was hardly comfortable in my singlehood, I figured I'd spend my life alone. And then at work on a busy Sunday, I bled. Just like that, James was gone. Much to my mother's chagrin, the miscarriage didn't make me recant my pro-choice status. I mourned, largely in secret. I cried about my recklessness, how I didn't know I was pregnant and could have been the reason I lost him. I let myself become hollow, and then I began to rebuild. 

The integrity of my new dreams is relatively the same — I want to write a bestselling series of fantasy novels, publish some poetry collections, and live out my Jo March character arc.

The dream will change too, in small forms. The house I imagine could become blue and surrounded by cows. The babies I dream of will have names and faces, and the passport stamps will become solid. The books I plan to write will be titled and finished. Small tweaks to the grand design are nothing I worry about. I'm right where I'm meant to be, for the first time in my life, and the vision is more solid than ever before. 

It was a series of accidents that led me here, and heartache, too. Had I not decided to change my mind and follow my heart, I wouldn't have moved alone across the country. The universe set up a series of detours and new landmarks to bring me to this final, meant-to-be path, and I'm forever grateful. 

Thank Freddie Mercury I made it this far. I can't wait to see where it goes. 

Jo 3/28/2022

Sonderly,

Jo