I just returned from my college reunion at Randolph College, formerly Randolph-Macon Women’s College in Lynchburg, Virginia, and I can say without hesitation that when one goes back in time like this, the experience becomes a reunion not just with one’s respective college journey and one’s best friends, but a reunion with oneself.
I was always certain I would attend college. The idea was never in doubt. Not quite an enthusiastic student of academia, I was, however, quite a passionate student of life. And when I went off to college, I was eager to make a new life for myself, one of utmost fun! It was the 80s after all, an era of expanding women’s awareness and our burgeoning place in this ever-expanding narrative—a time for the discovery of who this young woman was destined to become.
Photo Credit: Courtney Brinkerhoff-Rau IG: @cb.rau
Going to an all-girls school, as we called it then, isn’t for everyone, but it was for me. I knew it the moment I set foot on the campus as a prospective student that I would attend Randolph-Macon Woman’s College. I saw it for myself. I saw myself belonging. I saw the way forward for this blossoming young woman. R-MWC was going to be the place where I would meet other curious, like-minded young women, happily challenged and prospering in their respective college environments.
I saw my future self, and she was going to be smart, strong, capable, courageous, and willing to take chances. I graduated knowing this woman because I was given ample room to find her, not only by my upbringing at home but by the further scholastic upbringing I received at R-MWC. The varied college experiences, the professors who saw me for who I was, the many friends, and the permission to challenge myself further expanded the compassion, grace, aptitude, courage, faith, trust, and honesty I saw for myself with a fierce set of life skills I will lovingly refer to as grit.
Can you just hear the needle on the record player scratch out some Beauty and the Beat narrative with one swift screeeeech, as life after graduation took these Go-Go ideals for a spin of another kind. I got married. We raised two daughters. And as a mother determined to send my children off into a sharpened world with their own set of life-skills that included all that I had learned about myself as a young woman, I never realized how, despite the beat, I was bleeding from a wound so slight I hardly noticed it at all.
I loved and continue to love my mother self. I loved building a home and raising a family, and I especially loved the narrative, that of togetherness, but still, I ached. For what? I didn’t know. My youth? Perhaps a piece of it. My aptitude? Perhaps a piece of it. My creative self? Perhaps a piece of it. Channeling all that longing into motherhood, putting my creative self aside, and continuing to beat on, until one day, when I wrote my first children’s book for my daughters, something inside of me awakened. The title of the picture book is That’s How You Be It. Maybe it is time to revisit the story and write it anew for my grandchildren.
As a younger woman, I enjoyed dabbling in creative writing and playing the part of the writer on my father’s old typewriter, but serious, I was not. Little by little, with one inexperienced written story after another, the smart, tenacious, creative, capable woman began to return as I gave her more room to find her way back into my open heart. It has not been easy, certainly not a walk in the park, to give myself permission to find the diligent author and start my own publishing company, Tattered Script Publishing, to discover that I am disciplined, clever, fun, and courageous all at the same time. But I keep telling myself this woman was once there. She is not lost.
To my graduating, enthusiastic self, ready to tighten her laces and hit the pavement, running, I can look back from the road traveled and offer the following advice: Pulling from an overly used but indelible last line from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, The Great Gatsby, So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past, I offer a good line, an apt line, but is it nuanced enough for you? Perhaps it is time to honor the younger self and reclaim her, but look forward, Alicia, to all that is still left to be discovered. To coin a phrase from the playful and flirtatious all-female rock band, the Go-Gos: We got the beat.
I take this to mean, keep dancing despite the impulse to quit, to forfeit creative ambition and playfulness, all in the name of adulting. If you find yourself lost, go look. Turn over stones. Play. Create. Believe. Trust yourself to know what you know and trust the way. You won’t always see it. Life will throw a protective veil over you to help you, not hinder you, to hold you, not keep you held.
There is never one way to be. Explore the many aspects of yourself and learn to love them all. You will falter, and you will fail. You will love, and you will lose love. You will shine and witness others who dramatically outshine you. But at the end of the day, you can be joyously fulfilled knowing you completed a journey, began another, completed that one, began another, and another, and completed them all in the name of self-expansion.
We are expanding selves. We have missing parts. And it is on us, should we so desire, when we find ourselves on this journey called life, to reclaim the pieces we want, discard those that no longer fit, and grow a new spine. Yes! We can always and continually rewrite the script.
In loving gratitude to all those who have helped me along the way, usher me in, I thank you,
Alicia
