Part 1

The other night as I was driving home from the store, I noticed what seemed to be some sort of neighborhood park on the side of the road.

“Remember the street,” I said to myself.

Hyacinth.

I squinted and quickly committed it to memory as the street sign whizzed by.

“Remember Hyacinth.”

Pretty. Unique. I could remember that.

As soon as I opened my eyes this morning I wasted no time beginning to worry. I don’t know why, or how, my first instinct became this broad notion to worry, but it’s just something that happens naturally, I guess.

With lots of extra alone time in the past week, I’ve once again gotten extremely comfortable being by myself. And even though a good majority of my days are spent on Facetime with a multitude of different people in my life, the idea of braving the outside world for some real tangible face to face human interaction sounded petrifying.

Just the sheer thought made my stomach turn and my shoulders tense.

It might just be easier if I slink back into bed and forget this whole arrival into consciousness ever happened. A few minutes of counting sheep and I could be asleep again for good!

But alas, I knew that just wouldn’t cut it.

I fought the impulse and made my bed. No turning back now.

I looked at my half painted bookshelf and my mess of an art studio on the floor. Not yet, I thought. No patience for that this early.

Maybe I should eat. Yes, food that’s always good. Food and perhaps… a park. I do always like that combination.

As I drove to pick up my acai bowl from my favorite little shack in town, I thought about where I could go and sit.

Suddenly, I remembered.

Hyacinth.

No mapping. No cheating. A nice little challenge. I would find my way back to Hyacinth.

I really hope my parks not ugly in the day time.

As I wound through the surface streets of Point Loma, I realized I knew exactly where I was. It’s only taken about 5 months of living in town, but it’s a place that has become very familiar to me.

So I continued forth, turning here, climbing a hill there. Past the circle house with the floor to ceiling windows, the middle school on the left, there’s the big church, a few streets more and ah, yes, there it was right where I left it. Hyacinth.

Much larger of a grass patch than I’d originally thought. And in the day time, teeming with local folks and so many neighborhood dogs.

It seems silly to be proud of such a mundane thing. But proud I was. Proud that I had followed my instincts.

And they had not let me astray.

I find it always fascinating that we humans are born with an innate understanding of many things in this life. That we come pre-programmed, if you will, with certain fixed abilities that enable us to survive.

Our instincts.

Such a simple principle that these inherent tendencies activate when we need them the most.

To care and provide for our young, to protect ourselves and others, to feel a full range of emotions and experience things like hunger and passion.

When I was 16, I fell head over heels for a boy. One whom I had a hunch might feel the same about me. It was the first time in my young life where I felt like there was really a person I didn’t wanna live without. That I couldn’t imagine being with anyone else. The feelings crept up on me like a thief in the night.

I wondered constantly, about how he might feel. The circumstances were a bit muddy, a few people involved complicated the matter. So I consulted my most trusted people and I got a lot of “maybe’s.” A lot of “I don’t knows.” A lot of “well, of course who wouldn’t” and the occasional, “I mean, it depends, on what he shows.”

In the end, it didn’t matter how many people I asked or how many questions I posed. Because the only answer that every truly mattered was his — one it didn’t seem I was ever surely gonna get.

And yet, against all hope. All reason. All disregard for present circumstances — I just knew I couldn’t be wrong. That my gut feeling couldn’t be wrong. That my instincts hadn’t led me down a different path, I wasn’t delusional or crazy, I wasn’t making up signs and symbols and silly stories in my head. I wasn’t wrong.

That the look in a persons eyes when their gaze meets mine — well, how after peering so intently into a persons soul, can you be so wrong?

But alas, I did what we all must do at one point or another. I moved on. I picked up my little 16 year old heart pieces and I began to walk away. Onto 17. Right through 18 to a new love. To 19, through to the 20’s. Each year full of new opportunities in romance, new chances to chip away at the heart break of the past, and prove to myself and my soul that my instincts didn’t always have to be wrong.

That one bad apple doesn’t spoil the bunch.

Unfortunately, the distrust in my instincts didn’t end there. It crept sneakily into a lot of other aspects of my life.

Don’t trust the audition, it wasn’t good enough. Don’t get excited about the job, cause you clearly weren’t qualified enough to get it. Don’t move to that place, don’t desire that person, don’t want that thing.

Because clearly, you won’t get them.

And even if there is a slight chance in the universe, a blip in the system, if you want it too bad, it will surely never be yours.

I tried hard to fight these painful thoughts about deservedness. That it was okay to want and wish and hope for things. But that even more so, it was okay to trust the little voice in the back of my head that had come to know only doubt.

Instead, I wanted to try a different approach.

Unless you’re solving a quadratic equation, I think life’s too complicated to ever simply be right or wrong.

So I started to navigate according to that philosophy. That perhaps my instincts are not bad. They are not flawed and they are not untrue.

Because how could someone ever prove that your own unique, human instincts are wrong?

About five months ago, in what was undoubtedly one of the most liberating conversations of my young life, I learned that my 16 year old self was far from mistaken.

That, in fact, the person I had so desperately thrown myself into liking felt the same way about me.

And I was on cloud 9. Not because there was some far-fetched chance at reunion, not because I could scream “I told you so’s” into the abyss (which, I did), but because after what felt like ages of doubting every little move I made, I could finally trust.

Trust in myself.

I’ve grown so much since the age of 16.

I don’t have the same feelings for the same guy.

But we did drive to Jack in the Box last month and laughed our way through the town. We made breakfast, and went to parks, we danced to silly songs during the day, and ran furiously down the street to watch the sunset at night.

And even if it turns out he wasn’t everything to me, it was everything to me. Everything I could have ever dreamed of at 16 and more.

More because I’m no longer trapped by some frivolous notion that I can’t trust myself and my process. More because at 23, I don’t have the same feelings I did when I was young and naive. More because there is no expectation that I can control what others think or feel or do.

But I can and I will always be able to control — and trust — in me.

Part 2

It’s taken me a week to come back to these words, this story. A week, today, exactly.

I was too busy turning another year older, celebrating what my therapist and I lovingly dubbed my “re-EM-agining.”

It wasn’t a re-birthday, necessarily, I wouldn’t go so far as to say I’m a new me.

I’m just continuing to revitalize and reshape the person I want to be and find my way back to the very incredible person that I was — remembering my roots.

When I remember driving to Hyacinth last week, I remember a time when I was all of five years old. I was riding to pick up Chinese food with my dad and my uncle and from the back of the car in complete and utter darkness on a road way across town, I peered out the window and said “that’s where Mumma goes to the eye doctor.”

And I was correct. That is where my mother went to the eye doctor, a place at the age of five I had maybe been once.

But my instincts were spot on.

I know where I’ve been and I don’t know where I’m going.

But rest assured, even sitting small in the back of a fast moving car, no matter the age, I’ll never lose sight of where and who I am.