Y'all Come Sit a Spell

Today’s writing prompt seemed easy enough.
What’s the longest trip you’ve ever taken?
Alaska.
Six months.
Done.
Except six months is long enough that I’m not entirely sure Alaska qualifies as a trip. At some point, when you know where to buy groceries and have developed opinions about local roads, you may have crossed the line from visiting to living there.
Although Alaska never really became ordinary.
I was there long enough for it to.
It just didn’t.
I’ve traveled a fair bit since then. I’ve seen places that still live vividly in my memory. I’ve traveled through the Panama Canal, which deserves special recognition because there is something wonderfully audacious about getting on a ship in one ocean and getting off in another because humans looked at a whole-ass continent and said, You know what would make this easier? A hole.
And in a few weeks, I’ll fly to Barcelona, board another ship, visit Morocco and the Canary Islands, and then spend seven days crossing the Atlantic before eventually washing up in Miami.
I have traveled.
I have stories.
So Alaska should have been an easy answer.
But I got stuck on two words.
Longest.
Are we measuring distance?
Or time?
And then:
Trip.
Does a trip require us to physically go somewhere?
Because if it doesn’t, Alaska isn’t even close.
The longest trip I’ve ever taken is toward accepting myself.
And I’m still on it.
For a long time, I thought self-acceptance was somewhere I was supposed to arrive.
A destination.
There was some version of me out there who had figured everything out. She knew who she was. She understood why she did the things she did. She had dealt with all her baggage, presumably using one of those very efficient packing-cube systems.
She did not overthink.
She did not second-guess herself.
She certainly did not lie awake at three in the morning replaying something she said to a stranger in 1997.
She had her shit together.
I was going to become her eventually.
I spent a lot of years trying.
There were maps, although most of them had been drawn by other people.
Maps for what a successful woman should look like.
What adulthood should look like.
What a career should look like.
What productivity should look like.
What my body should look like.
How much space I should take up.
How loudly I should speak.
Which parts of myself were charming and which ones needed to be toned down a little.
Or a lot.
I followed some of those maps for miles.
Turns out, a surprising number of them weren’t going anywhere I wanted to go.
Somewhere along the way, I started throwing them out.
Not all at once.
There was no dramatic bonfire where I burned society’s expectations while dancing naked beneath the full moon.
Although now that I’ve written that sentence, I admit there are possibilities.
It happened more quietly.
I started noticing when something didn’t fit.
I started asking why I was trying so hard to make it fit anyway.
I started realizing that some of the things I had spent years trying to fix weren’t necessarily broken.
Some were simply mine.
I started getting curious.
And curiosity changed everything.
Instead of asking, What the hell is wrong with me?
I started asking, Why do I do that?
Instead of, Why can’t I be more like everyone else?
I started wondering whether I actually wanted to be.
Instead of trying to become the woman I thought I was supposed to be, I started paying attention to the woman who was already here.
She’s interesting.
She is also exhausting.
We’re working on it.
She gets wildly excited about things. She collects interests like other people collect refrigerator magnets. She can lose an afternoon researching something she did not know existed that morning. She has opinions.
So many opinions.
Occasionally a stranger says something within earshot and her head whips around because Actually…
Someone usually intervenes.
Usually.
For years, I thought maturity would eventually sand down some of those edges.
Instead, I’m discovering I rather like them.
And lately, something else has happened.
I’ve started meeting parts of myself I didn’t know were still there.
The woman who writes because she has something to say.
The woman who makes things simply because the idea delighted her.
The woman who will try something without first demanding proof that she’ll succeed.
The woman who gets excited and follows the excitement just to see where it goes.
The woman who has spent enough of her life worrying about whether she was too much and has finally begun to wonder whether too much for whom?
I like her.
Not every day.
Let’s not get carried away.
Self-acceptance is not waking up every morning, gazing lovingly into the mirror, and whispering affirmations to your reflection while sunlight streams through gauzy curtains.
Some mornings you look in the mirror and think, Jesus Christ, woman.
That counts too.
Because maybe self-acceptance isn’t loving every single thing about yourself.
Maybe it’s simply no longer treating yourself like a problem you are obligated to solve.
Maybe it’s being able to look at the whole messy collection and say:
Okay. This is who we’re traveling with.
Pack snacks.
I used to think there would be an arrival.
That one day I would finally understand myself, forgive myself, love myself properly, and plant a little flag that said:
MADE IT.
I don’t think that anymore.
And I’m glad.
I’ve been to Alaska.
I’ve crossed the Panama Canal.
I’ve traveled thousands of miles to see what was on the other side of the horizon.
But this?
This is the longest trip I’ve ever taken.
And for the first time in my life, I don’t want the trip to end.
There are still parts of me I haven’t met yet.
I’d like to see where she takes me.