I remember sitting at a coffee shop in Portland a couple years ago with a ripped out page from my daily planner that had the heading “The woman I want to be”underlined at the top. I divided the page into three separate parts: emotional, spiritual, physical. Drew a stick figure under physical. Drew some bullet points. Made a few lists.
At the time, I wrote lists the way junkies smoked crack. I was averaging one new planner a month. I was singlehandedly keeping Post-It in business. And I was exceedingly anxious, all. the. time. But I can’t remember actually living in that life. I don’t remember what it was like to wake up, roll out of bed, and feel crushed by the arbitrary weight of a to-do list in a planner.
It might seem depressing, but lately when I have been feeling low I focus on that fact: the fact that in even a week, I won’t remember the details of this evening. I’ll be feeling completely different, for completely different reasons.
And this is why I believe in reincarnation.
I mean, my belief in it is irrelevant… I’m pretty sure regardless of what we believe will happen after we die is irrelevant. Whatever is going to happen will happen without regard to our personal philosophies, but I’m not actually talking about postmortem reincarnation. And as much as I actually do believe in some sort of recycling of the soul, I’m not too concerned about whether or not it will actually happen. Because I’ve been reincarnated dozens of times in my short 21 years.
There was the time I was an infant. Or the time I saw green grass for the first time. There was the time when I fed goats as a toddler, or the time I went to my first real school. There was the little girl who did ballet and tap.The pre-pubescent in community theater. The girl in a school uniform. The seventh grader at my first dance. An American abroad. The high schooler, the licensed driver, the college girl. I’ve been a friend to people I don’t know anymore, to people who wouldn’t recognize me today. People I wouldn’t recognize today. A girl I wouldn’t recognize today.
I’m terribly unbothered with Twitter and the hashtag “ruining” the English language, because I’ve finally realized what it is that we try to accomplish with these sites, and why they will ultimately fail at accurately documenting our lives.
We put up albums titled “Summer of 2011″, we group our friends into groups headed “School friends”, “Coworkers”, we hashtag and tag and group and categorize and subcategorize to our little hearts content but ultimately, it is futile. Who determines when “Summer of 2011″ begins and ends? What about the individuals that are school friends, coworkers, and our best friends? What about the moments of our lives that are too painful or private to document publicly on our Facebook timelines? And even if Facebook and Twitter integrate the features necessary to subcategorize everything absolutely perfectly, what do the categorizing of our photos and friends really say about who we are, or who we’ve been?
I’ve simultaneously embraced and been petrified of the concept of reincarnation for awhile now. My ego is bruised imagining an existence of my soul where I wouldn’t know who Alexis Julian is, because I like her, I like her a lot. But the real rub is that she’s elusive. I’ve worn many hats in my life. I’ve played many roles, I’ve lead a myriad of very different “lives” all within this one. And even though these same eyes have opened every day of my 21 years, the same brain has thought, the same hands have touched… I don’t remember living and breathing each of those lives. Sometimes it feels as though the events of my life unfolded before a completely different person. And yet it was me all along.
So this one is for the girl who wrote the list titled “The woman I want to be” and the woman that would be. Here I am. A lot closer in many ways, lightyears away in others. But 100% myself all the same. Each day I peel back another layer, every moment I become a little more her, and a little different too. I’m not going to be afraid of “real” reincarnation, should that ever come. I’ve had a lot of practice.
