When you’re a child, there are certain rights of passage that are considered building blocks to adulthood. Moments that are anticipated, celebrated and memorialized as the milestones they are.
Yet as an adult, experience provides a type of x-ray lense through which to view the real formative moments of our youth. Ones that shaped us, leaving us impacted for decades, despite there being no pomp and circumstance to mark that they occurred.
Somewhere in the midst of the haze of the pandemic – back when days, weeks and months blurred together to form a moment in time – my parents decided to sell my childhood home. It was an emotional endeavor, one that involved sorting through over 40 years’ worth of memories that had been shoved into every nook and cranny of the house.
When I was summoned to the basement to sort through the pile of my stuff that remained despite me not living under that roof for nearly 15 years, I was dismayed by how much I had accumulated. Overwhelmed, I took it home, only to move it all again a year later when my husband and I ourselves relocated, never properly examining the contents that threatened to explode the Rubbermaid bins.
“In a world where you can be anything, be kind.” It’s one of those easily memorable, effective, hanging-on-a-coffee-shop-wall quotes, that has become so ubiquitous that a google search for its author returns multiple results.
Its appeal, no doubt, is in the inarguable validity of its message. Yet its own introductory phrase – in a world where you can be anything – is what, to me, seems to carry additional weight at a time when hobbies can turn into side hustles, and leaving your mark is only an Instagram account or Etsy shop away.
On March 2nd, 2001 my freshman-in-college self was on a quick break between dance classes when I stopped back at my dorm to refuel. The timing proved serendipitous, because it was during this one-hour window that I got the news that my sister had gone into labor and that I should try to get home.
The call came through on a landline, as my first cell phone was still over a year away. And in the midst of my excitement, I still recall consulting my paper trifold schedule to determine how quickly I could catch a train out of Grand Central to CT.
It’s one of those memories that’s so imbedded in my mind’s eye that I remember what I was wearing. My outfit, of course, meticulously planned and executed, was a critical piece of the mosaic of that day.
And so was my makeup. At fifteen years old, the fact that I had recently been granted permission to wear mascara and clear lip gloss was more than a rite of passage. It was a desperately craved form of expression, yes, but moreover, it felt like a gateway to the future me.
For a significant chapter of my life, running was my outlet of choice. Pre-dawn, feet making music against the pavement, I would settle into the monotony of a rhythm that swallowed me whole.
I felt both everything and nothing while I was running. Mind lost in thought, it was assumed my body would defy the odds. The more extreme the conditions, the better test of my merit.
Darkness. Coldness. Exhaustion. These were the running partners that challenged my soul.
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