Patron Saint of Trying New Things

I learned how to play piano when I was ten years old. After two years of avoiding practice, my mom got tired of paying for lessons and the electric piano in my room became more of an alternate shelf for laundry or an additional napping spot for my cats. Still, when I picked up a guitar this year, I saw the strings and frets less as parts of the actual instrument and more as a translation of the piano keys I was so familiar with nearly a decade ago. At the beginning of the semester, I found myself doing the same with Spanish: my fluency extended only to the point of understanding, not embodiment. I think I found myself doing it with love, grasping at the mostly-vague memories I have of my first love at sixteen, or eighteen, or twenty. I try to remember the ways we knew each other and hurt each other, the names we’d give our hypothetical children. How I loved so-and-so in a way she didn’t need, how such-and-such loved me in a way I couldn’t understand, how they loved the sound of my name next to theirs more than the person my name belonged to. Etcetera etcetera. 

Today, I am in bed and awake and alive. My dreams are, like I hoped they would be, bilingual. I have become the person I thought I was. I am soft and breathing, and the “I” part doesn’t feel nearly as important as it used to, which again, is to say: I have become the person I thought I was. Or at least, I’ve taken another step toward her. Now, that person is not yet someone whose hands can properly play a barre chord… but that’s fine. And if you’d met me a few years ago, I would tell you it wasn’t fine at all. I would tell you I was mortally wounded by my own incompetence, my inability. But as the East Coast’s very own swamp high priestess, Doechii, once said: it’s your right to suck at things when you’re starting out. My comfort with not knowing things has become a huge marker of growth for me, and in a country completely foreign to me, it’s become a daily necessity. I encourage you to find that comfort within your own study abroad journey. Be confused, be curious, be open. Isn’t it incredible to learn something new? That can’t happen if you already know everything… and I promise you, from first-hand experience, you don’t. No one does. And besides, the point isn’t the knowing itself, it’s the knowledge. Whether it’s a new academic field, a new hobby, a new language, or all of the above, dive head first into confidently saying “I don’t know!” as often as you can.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what this semester will mean in the greater context of my life story, and I keep coming back to the idea of revealing it to my future child, the way my dad dropped earth-shattering lore on me at 3am only to never bring it up again. I want to be an example for that lil peanut, tell them that yes, I had the time of my life, and yes, it’s because I ran into that unknown discomfort. And that’s part of why I’m here really, to be somebody’s mom one day. I don’t necessarily mean that in a literal way — it doesn’t have to be my child, not by my own genetics, or my own adoption, or my own last name. A child is the tangible iteration of hope. As an ecologist, an artist, a believer in ghosts, a sap, a romantic, a clown, a human being in these terrifying times, I need hope. And the only way to get it is by learning. Be open. Be here.