What Would Your Ten-Year Old Self Think?
This started as a Friday icebreaker at work. I didn't expect it to become a reminder of why I travel, why friendships matter, and why some childhood dreams deserve to follow us into adulthood.
I was in a meeting and we do a question of the day every Friday. The question that was asked was, “What would your ten-year-old self think is really cool about your life now?” Now for those of you who haven’t known me my whole life, I was not always the confident blonde bombshell you see before you today. I was chubby, painfully shy, smart enough to make other kids (and some adults) uncomfortable, and I only had one or two close friends. We lived 20 miles from town, so the bus ride was about an hour each way. I spent that time trying to be invisible with my nose buried in a book or staring out the window daydreaming about all the friends I would have and the exciting places I would go when I was a grown-up. At that time, both the idea of having a large group of girlfriends and also traveling anywhere that wasn’t within a day's drive seemed like a bigger fantasy than finding the portal to Narnia. Ask any awkward kid, former or current, and they’ll tell you that a rich fantasy life is really the only thing that helps them escape the reality of not being the cool kid in the lunchroom. That was me. The daydreamer. I wanted to go places and see things that no one in my family had even thought about seeing and I knew deep in my soul that I was meant to.
It was that year that we took a family trip to DisneyLand. I remember being in Southern California and getting a new outfit at a mall with an escalator. Yes, I was gobsmacked by a movable staircase, ya’ll. And I bought a Menudo cassette. I had developed an obsession with the Puerto Rican boy band based off of my voracious consumption of Teen Beat and BOP magazines. I made my parents listen to that cassette on repeat while my dad was trying to navigate the horror of Los Angeles traffic as a rancher used to 2 lane highways and dirt roads in Wyoming. If you would like a little sample of the torture that he was forced to endure look up “Summer In The Streets” - Menudo on YouTube. It’s a banger. Anyway, it was on that trip that I was allowed to be “me”. I wasn’t the awkward ranch kid who didn’t fit in at the ranch or anywhere else for that matter, I was the cool kid that had her toes in the ocean with the fancy new outfit that was purchased from the mall with the escalator and the new music she wasn’t sure she liked but knew that no one else in her school was listening to.
Life got easier as I began to navigate my teen years thanks to a gorgeous best friend that I latched onto in 7th grade and the fact that the boobs I had tried to hide for 3 years finally weren’t something I needed to be embarrassed by anymore. But I was still a daydreamer. I knew I was meant to see and do amazing things, but it wasn’t until my 20’s that I actually left the country.
Since then, travel has always been the thing that brings me back to myself. I’ve stood in the National Gallery in London gazing at the original Water Lilies by Claude Monet knowing I had a print hanging in my dorm room. I watched the Eiffel Tower light up the night sky and gorged on French pastries with my sister by my side. I jumped into the Mediterranean and snorkeled in the Indian Ocean after sailing on a boat carved from a mango tree, half scared to death but not willing to miss the opportunity. I watched the sunrise in Kampala as the smell of coal fires burned my lungs and the sound of children waking for school sang joyously in my ears. I’ve overlooked the Ngorongoro Crater as zebras, water buffalos, elephants, lions and hyenas made their way across the savannah. I’ve drunk countless peach mimosas and margaritas on a cruise ship to the Caribbean and had spiritual awakenings in Sedona, and celebrated the winter solstice in Miami with ecstatic dance.
And I've been blessed to experience so much of it with my sister, my mom, or my best friends by my side. Ten-year-old me dreamed about faraway places and having a circle of women who truly saw me. Fifty-one-year-old me has a tribe that has carried me through the darkest seasons of my life, and a bucket list that somehow keeps getting longer every year.
That awkward kid who never felt like she belonged finally found a home. It wasn't one place, it was all the places. She didn't change. She simply found her people.
And I think she'd think that's pretty damn cool.
