Drawing Outside the Lines of Identity
What keeps you going forward?
At the beginning, I remember there were days when I would aimlessly wonder around the streets. I literally had nowhere to go. Nowhere to be and nobody was waiting for me anywhere. I was 16, I was alone in a foreign country and it was something I have chosen for myself.
Arguably of course, I had a family across the world that I could always return too, but there was some intuitive realization of the toxicity of that life. The suffocating feeling that kept following me since I was a little kid. Or perhaps it was just a personality trait — innate and inevitable.
I remember being 6 years old running around with my brother at my family’s cottage. My grandparents are about to leave back for the city and keep calling on us. They are getting impatient. They start the car to pretend like they are really going to leave without us. My brother instantly catches up and gets in a car. The thought of them leaving was scary to him, the thought of them living felt liberating to me. Exciting even.
I pause and wonder to myself, “Can they really leave?”
They see me walking slowly in the distance and so they start to drive off — again thinking that will make me come faster. Only it doesn’t. I watch them leave until their car disappears behind the…
