I Am Mine

“Then one day, in his own good time, Leo bloomed.”

 Robert Kraus, Leo the Late Bloomer

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I am different.  I am behind and always have been.  What constitutes as a storm for me is fair weather for most.  I can handle drama and heartbreak and independence and being alone, but getting a haircut? Making a phone call? Hanging out?  All these are inexplicably difficult for me.  While in many ways I have always been mature for my age, I’ve also always been a late bloomer.

• When the other girls were discovering boys, I had the perspective to see how ridiculous middle school “dating” was, but was also too behind to care at all.  And so I picked up the explanation that Naomi does not date.

• When they were buying makeup and nail polish and experimenting with how to present themselves, I was still too busy playing in the woods with my stories. And so I reasoned that Naomi is not feminine.

• When the others were becoming intensely and self-consciously aware of the outside world, I tried my hardest not to fit in.  And so I accepted that Naomi is just weird.

• When friends cried during cheesy movies and experienced the turbulence of emotion, I felt nothing.  And so I concluded that Naomi is a rational, rather than emotional, being.

Now, years later, as I am blooming in these areas, I am finally becoming unshackled by the explanations and identities with which I have clothed myself over the years.  As I write this, my toenails are painted bright pink.  I recently went on my first ever shopping trip of my own volition, and there was a solid two week stretch a while back were I showered every single day!  I am growing in ways I never thought I would.

Growth takes time.  It is unpredictable and full of surprises.  And that is the fun of it.  Sometimes I long to be on the same timetable as others.  But in the end, I am happier being me.  Funny, little ol’ Naomi.  Naomi who wore a terry cloth turban to school to celebrate “Towel Day.”  Naomi who feels sick to her stomach about things that make most girls giddy.  Naomi who is different, who has so far to grow, but is enjoying the innocence and ignorance of her slow process.  “So never mind  I will not pine, for I am mine.”

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Growing Down

I’ve grown up a lot these past months, though, as those who have truly matured can attest, it’s been more like growing down.  “Life is not linear,” a good friend often reminds me.  It is cyclical, or maybe more of a spiral.  Trace your finger around a slinky and you will find progress comes only through regression.

In the woods behind my dorm I have many special places.  Paths made sacred by encounters with the divine and the human.  I like to dwell in, to name, to make monuments of these spots.  There is one deep gully marked by a sign I erected that reads “Долина жажды,” the Valley of Longing.  But of late my wanderings have left the valleys and returned to higher ground.

There, closer to the main path than I normally venture, I was told to build a dwelling.  I saw two fallen trees leaning against a tall trunk and a little girl called out from within me to make it my own.  For the next several days, I drug fallen branches through the ivy and built up my lean-to.  I joyfully and diligently set about my task, not caring how silly it was.  All the while, this mantra rang through my head, “enter as a child.”  

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For some reason the college finds it necessary to mow up all the leaves each time they blanket the ground.  As I walk ahead of the greedy machine, I have a deep sense of mourning, of tragedy, of duty.  My ears strain to hear the crunch under my feet over the whirring blades.  My lungs, used to breathing in the nostalgia of the autumn air, choke on the fumes and the dust of pulverized leaves. I bend down impulsively, as if I could gather all the leaves in my arms and carry them off to safety.

Suddenly, I have a picture in my mind- a young girl in a blue gingham dress, blonde hair streaming out of a pink bonnet and wicker basket over her arm.  She is running franticly before the quickly approaching mower, stuffing fistfuls of weeds into the basket till it overflows.

 She had woken up a few days prior to joyfully find the yard sprinkled with perfect little white flowers.  She had lain out in the grass, admiring them, imagining the many uses this plant could have out here in the wild prairie.

So it was with horror that she watched her mother start the mower and plow over the shining white blooms.  The girl didn’t even think about what she was doing.  All she knew was that she had to save these flowers from a horrible death.  And so she ripped them up and tucked them safely away.

But that day she encountered an unnerving truth.  She couldn’t keep the flowers safe.  There they sat in her basket, turning brown and quickly losing all beauty until she had to admit their death and throw them out.   And a part of that little girl, of her youth and her innocence, faded and died with those flowers.

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I’m surprised to be remembering this story from my childhood, I hadn’t thought of it in years.  I have matured; I no longer need to stop the destruction before me.  I am confident in the knowledge that just as the flowers returned the next spring, so too there will be infinitely more leaves that crunch beneath my feet in years to come.  But although I don’t bother filling my arms with the fallen golden jewels, I sense a reawakening in a part of my heart that I had grown out of all those years ago.

This is growing down.  It is the relearning of habits I worked so hard to eradicate.  It is the rediscovering of lost joys and the revisiting of sorrows long forgotten.  It is entering as a child, learning to delight in the wonder of each mundane moment.  It is allowing myself to be, to live, to mature without losing sight of the little girl who adventures through the wild.  So I stand here, on the cusp of my second decade, and I can only hope that as I grow up, I will also grow down.

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