Vacating Your Life

This whole entire time that I have been on break, every attempt to write a post in my blog has been such a chore. I seem to have the unfortunate habit of editing my thoughts so quickly that by the time I get myself in front of a computer to document what seemed to be highly interesting thoughts, I would have edited myself out of material completely. And so another day is left undocumented, because I have deemed my life too…mundane. Who would want to read about that?

Ever since I came across the movie Sabrina, way back in high school, I have been enamored by the thought of leaving a dull life and coming back an entirely different person. An enchanting person. A person you would want to get to know. Many a trip has been planned with that very hopeful outcome in mind, but every time I leave I seem to just fall back into my old unsavory habit of letting people run my life the way they think I should. And then I return exactly the same person that I disliked so much to begin with.

In fact, every time an unfortunate incident occurs...I get so ashamed of how I deal with things that I end up just cutting out that part of my life and boxing it in somewhere in my memory…hopefully never to return. I am like one of those sad people in teenybopper movies who still feel the sting of old hurts. Like never being asked to go to prom, or never being invited for Saturday nights out. Like having to be the first to call so that I would have someone to talk to on long dull nights. Like being the last to find out something. Like the one who always had to walk around so that people don’t notice that she’s alone. Old “friends” are carefully sealed inside and old hurts are tightly wrapped in bright bows inside my head – attempts to color dark points.
Then I pretend that I am unscarred and unbroken and I try to act as normally as possible around the new people whom I hope will think I am normal.

No one has wanted to leave their entire life and become a different person more than me. The other night, I heard someone say that they wanted to vacate their life and that phrase just struck a chord in me, because that’s exactly what I want to do. In my head I have planned a million scenarios for vacating my life. But somehow I never seem to be capable of doing it.

Now, the thought has never been more present in my head than it is now. I suppose watching the movie “The Holiday” last night did a lot to bring this old secret wish back to my consciousness. I feel like leaving my life is exactly what I want to do. This whole entire time I have been thinking about physically going some place else to be someone else in order to have the life I wish to have.

But here’s a different thought. What about waking up and just deciding to be a different person entirely? You wake up, and snap! You’re a different person. Not the pushover you hate. Not the walrus you see in the mirror. That would be a delight indeed.

Now, perhaps, I am as ambitious as the man who tried to empty the ocean one spoonful at a time – but I will no longer edit myself like I used to. That’s no longer who I am.