Baggage

Along with the extraneous pairs of pleated pants, shimmering shirts and scuffed shoes that I lugged with me to New York City, I also dragged along several trunks, totes and suitcases of expectations, fears and doubts.

Expectations of my Self.  The Self I want to meet around each street corner.  Laughing, excited, personable, confident and childlike.  My confident Self dressed in clashing colors of red and pinks, mismatched socks on purpose, strutting their attitude of indifference, but not callously, only confidently.  The me that brims with such a joy for life that I'm a regular contributor to Oprah Magazine, that I make frequent appearances on David Letterman and that I travel the world making appearances and signing my popular self help "inner rags to inner riches" book.

Fears of that same Self.  The Self I usually meet in the bathroom mirror as the dawn breaks over the horizon and the dark smell of brewing coffee fills my senses, reminding  me that it is a new day, another day for renewal if I will just get out of my own damn way.  Fears that the popular girls won't like me.  How did they get to be so damn popular anyway?  Fears that they will and I'll have to routinely buy menthol cigarettes to compete with their smoke-filled Saturday nights and regularly purge the meal I couldn't afford in the first place, to maintain my svelte, pristine girl like figure.

Doubts that I'll never leave my room.  That one of the other tenants wille eventually notice a putrid smell wafting beneath the wooden door of my tiny, street facing room.  The landlady will be called and she'll ask her boyfriend to open that wooden door for fear that she'll find exactly what she'll find.  Which of course will be me, lounging in my twin bed, so unshaven that the hairs on my legs have wrapped themselves around the bedframe and my stain is permanently etched in the black duvet cover.  Mounds of chocolate bar wrappers are heaped to the ceiling, blocking any natural light from the cork-blinded windows and I'm dazed, listless, and quite content.

My greatest fear, moving to New York City from my small fishing community of Homer, Alaska is that I will become complacent and content with my own mediocrity.  I don't seek success as deemed by general society to be a fat bank account and a life of privilege and leisure, but rather, I ache, yearn for success that means a life filled with joy, excitement, the confident, striving me who pushes past her self-imposed restrictions and breaks free of inner bondages to leap, jump, let go and be.  To be the best me I can be, with the gifts and talents the Universe thought fit to bestow upon me.  

Ahhhh.  Then, I can let the trunks, totes and suitcases fall where they may and get on with getting on to the life I intend to create.