The month before I moved to England my father gave me a tan moleskin journal for Christmas. He never said what it was for. I figured it would be a travel journal, carefully dated, documenting every museum, every gondola ride, every baguette. But I was not that kind of traveler, the kind that could revel in the weightlessness of it; being everywhere and nowhere at once. Instead, I filled the journal with lists. A list for the Netflix queue I had put on hold; a list of library books to check out; one of seeds to start when I returned in the summer; even a list of feelings I could not let myself forget. Every one of those lists was crafted in pain, in absolute fear of losing my grip on the little life I had back in San Diego. A week in I called the boyfriend I had broken up with just weeks before, asked him to take me back. He did. I backpedaled, trying to undo the decision I had made to live 5,000 miles from home.
For those first few weeks I shrunk into a smaller, frightened version of myself. I was unrecognizable. Thankfully, it didn’t last. Eventually, I became myself again, the girl that needed the adventure in the first place. That girl made fast friends, saw everything she drooled over in her art history classes, and even crashed a wedding and danced on tabletops. But I won’t forget the lists. They are that tender part of me that wants a quiet life but doesn’t always know how to live within it. They are the counterpart to the side of me that dreams big and wants to set the rules on fire.
At 31, I find myself still walking this narrow line between freedom and form. More often than not I am falling over painfully onto one side or the other. The balance never feels quite right. But I am starting to make peace with the clumsiness of it all. Or at least showing myself a bit of grace in the process.