If you have no idea who you are anymore, try to recall a time when you did. When you knew who you were undeniably. When you moved with a sureness that came from presenting yourself in the truest way — whether people liked you or not, whether someone hired you or not, whether you could avoid an argument or not.
The you you were when belly-laughing was something that happened often. When seeing someone you cared about made you feel excited rather than obligated. When just being outside in the sun or in a coffee shop reading left you with the undeniable buzz of being alive.
A time when you thought and felt, hell, you knew, the whole world was at your feet. Your whole life was in front of you, figuratively or literally.
The first lesson I received — and then promptly ignored — in how not to live my life, how not to be who I was, came when I was dating my future husband. We’d been out to dinner at the Chart House in Boston. When we left, it was raining. I grabbed his hand and tried to pull him a few feet away from the restaurant door toward the edge of the wharf that looked across the water to Logan Airport.
I wanted to dance with him in the rain. I wanted to turn my head up to the night sky and feel the drops falling from the heavens. I wanted to shake my limbs and act goofy and maybe take a waltzy/schmaltzy turn around the brick area that looked like a dance floor to my eyes. I wanted to laugh and have him kiss me in the pouring rain. I wanted to press my body next to his. I wanted to get soaked to the skin and shiver all the way home and then warm our bodies the best way two humans can.
He wouldn’t come with me.
I hesitated for a moment, let go of his hand, and then went to the water’s edge by myself. I stood just for a moment, in the rain, and stared at Logan, stared down into the water. I didn’t dance. After a moment, I heard him call, “Let’s go.” I turned and walked back to him; we caught a cab, I think, and went home.
I knew then, really, in my heart, that I was putting a piece of myself by the wayside. A vital part of me. The part that will be 70 and still want to dance in the rain. Even if I catch my death of cold and die as a result. And there are some people who never want to dance in the rain. Nothing wrong with either approach to life.
But you have to know who you are and not let the person that you are fall or get pushed to the wayside. My husband didn’t push my rain-dancing self to the side — I did. And it was the first in a long line of mistakes I would make in my desire to create and sustain a relationship with him.
I still am struggling with this whole concept — the concept of being wild at heart and and yet still creating a life that offers more than just eking out a living, taking photos of three cats, and spending holidays alone.
Is it possible to be married and still maintain that wildness? Is it possible to find a partner who will not be bothered by my desire to traipse off to Italy alone? Is it possible to have a relationship in which love and sex and passion and romance and being your own, independent person, does not get sucked into the desert of familial obligations, trash that needs to be taken out, questions about what we’ll have for dinner, what television show to watch, and arguments about what time to go to bed and who’s going to pay what bill?
Is it possible to be in love and not let that romantic, goofy part of you that dances crazily in the rain be sacrificed to your partner’s practical — and quite sane — desire in wanting to get home dry and without the sniffles?