The Wild Beautiful Life

Last year, my sophomore year of high school, I attended a boarding school in the mountains of southern California. It was an arts school. I applied by choice, I fantasized about going there, but by the time that I actually received my financial aid award and accepted admission, it felt like a resignation. I didn't want to leave the town I had grown up in--not because I was afraid of leaving, but because I was happy there. I was genuinely happy. I had fantasized about being the brave one, the adventurous one, the one who leaves for a boarding school a thousand miles away, but this is not why I left. I left only because my family was moving to New Mexico anyway.

There was a highway that ran along the outskirts of the campus. My dorm, the small quirky honors-student dorm that had no alarms on the windows, was located right next to the highway. I used to walk along it every day to and from my academic classes, to and from my creative writing classes, to and from the library. One night, I was walking with my three best friends. It was so dark that we couldn't see each other's faces. "Do you ever imagine seeing video clips of your life?" Katie asked. "Like, imagine that you can see into your future, but you only see a clip that is less than a minute long."

The rest of us had never imagined this.

"Well," she continued, "this is one of those moments where, if I had seen it in a clip a long time ago, I wouldn't have believed it. I wouldn't have known how I got there."

I understood what she meant. The highway was surreal--long and winding and isolated and so dark--but our lives were the same way. Before coming here, we had always lived with our families. We had attended school with the same group of people for several years in a row. None of those clips would have surprised us; we would have been able to pick out the settings, the people.

All year long, this feeling of being untethered had terrified me, had left me numb and wanting and yearning and broken. But, now, as we neared our dorm in the dark, we laughed about the absurdity of our lives, and I felt better--not tethered, not certain, but also not alone.

I want to have a wild beautiful life. I know that this will mean feeling untethered. It will mean making mistakes. It will mean joy. It will mean more dark highways. It will mean more homesickness. It will mean that the imaginary clips of my future will be unrecognizable. I am learning to embrace that uncertainty.

Image here, taken from Into the Wild.