In an email to me not so long ago, a friend was outlining her travel flubs as she made her way from Washington, D.C. to Florence, stopping in Berlin for a layover along the way. She had just confused pounds for euros, and had been publicly scolded for her ignorance.
“Despite these minor slip-ups,” she wrote, “I cannot help but think how incredibly lucky I am to be living out the life I imagined I would as a kid. I have to admit it is weird, however, because I have to consciously think about this and remind myself that I am the person of my imagination now.”
What followed was a lengthy correspondence about being an adult, about what it meant to feel yourself moving forward in time while also being very conscious of the ambiguousness of our age. We just couldn’t believe this time of traveling was our life. It was very much what we had wished for and dreamed about for so long, and here we were for real and it didn’t feel quite real and we didn’t feel so old ... so were we really adults? Or, were we just bopping along, not quite old but not quite young, not quite sure what we were doing and where we were going?
We talked about the long-held images we had each had for our older selves while growing up. My emailing friend reminisced on associating “mascara, French manicures, briefcases and Hilary Duff” with maturity. For me, the image had less to do with Hilary Duff and more to do with Kate Spade, with light blues and long hair and silver bracelets and dainty arms and black heels.
My image of adulthood, then, has stayed relatively the same since my childhood. I think of grace. I think of walking through a city's streets with a long but small purse draped over my shoulder, with wide eyes and a laughing smile. I don't think of harshness, of cynicism or of a hardened heart. I think of openness and happiness and freedom and, wrapped up in and connecting all of those things, of grace.
And while I often remind myself that I am now some sort of an adult, I know that I haven’t arrived at my image of adulthood yet. Still, I hope that as I move through more places and more years, I inch the slightest bit closer to that ideal.
I am thrilled because I feel that over the course of these past few years of school, and this past semester abroad specifically, I have crept slowly towards becoming the person who I’ve always wanted to be — I read, I write, I think, I move, I try to be good to people, to find good people and to surround myself with good people. I try to follow that which I want to do and chase that which I want to see.
Is this not being an adult? Is this not being a fully-grown, capital-W Woman?
In a poetry class last fall, I found myself stuck on a poem called “The Silken Tent,” by Robert Frost. It compares a woman, presumably Frost’s wife, to a tent — “she is as in a field a silken tent” — and admires her for her gracefulness, her ability to stand tall and unwavering and how she can be depended upon by so many yet never give off the appearance of concern. On first read, I was taken aback, offended almost — I wanted nothing to do with a silken tent, was totally turned off by the idea of being compared, as a woman, to an inanimate object.
But my second read left me more inspired — actually, I wanted to be a silken tent myself. I desired to be seen as thoroughly grounded, rooted and upstanding, dependably needed and silently needing. The silken tent became synonymous with my idea of adulthood, of womanhood; it transformed from being seen as something powerless and projected upon to something strong and admirable, something graceful.
Not too long ago, I was on a bus in India, head out the window, staring at the streets, taking careful notice of each person, interaction, eye contact and arm grab. And while watching, I thought of someone else, someone I know now or will know later, looking at a printed picture of me on that very trip and imagining me in that moment; imagining me with my head out the window; imagining me thinking these same things that I was thinking now. I thought to myself: “This is you becoming a woman.”
Not that I wasn’t one before. Not that I am fully one yet. But nevertheless, there, in that moving moment of watching and being watched, I could feel myself becoming the person I would one day be. I didn’t have the Kate Spade, the long purse, the light blue, the black heels or the dainty arms, but I had — I like to think — the wide eyes, the laughing smile, the calm confidence of navigating a new place and the visible joy that accompanies watching warm scenes of the everyday play out through an open bus window. I felt comforted by certainties and disquieted by the certainty that there are no certainties except that I am here and I am on my way. And I am — or I hope I am — becoming someone to be proud of.
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