Sunday Scribbling...who else can i still be?

I remember being a child and being told I could be anything I wanted to be when I “grew up”. Well, now I am all grown up (okay, so only partially grown up) and every day I am faced with choices about who exactly it is that I want to be.

There are so many people I could have been. So many crossroads in my life where had I chosen a different route, my destiny might have been forever changed. I could have been a wife or mother, driving a minivan filled with rambunctious children. I could have been my own demented version of Martha Stewart, spending my mornings baking cakes and my afternoons cleaning the house. But in all reality, that possibility was never very likely. More realistically, I could have been a rebel outcast, adorning myself in leather combat boots and black nail polish. I could have been a rockstar’s girlfriend or a groupie or a wanna-be hippie, smoking cloves as I stood barefoot in a field of daisies. And to be completely honest, I could have been a perpetual patient in a psychiatric hospital. Or I could have been dead.

The truth is that I came pretty damn close to being some of these people. With the exception of Martha Stewart, I dipped my toes in most of these identities, trying them on for size, getting a feel for how it felt to be a wife or a rebel or a psych patient. But the clothes never quite fit. Some were far too big, no way to keep them on. Others were too tight, too suffocating for me to even breathe. And so I abandoned these identities. But in trying on the outfits, I learned more about who it is that I do want to be.

So to answer the question…who else can I still be? I can still be anyone I want to be. The question truly lies more in who that ideal person, that ideal “me”, really is.

I can still be a wife and possibly even a mother, one day, some day, but not today. I can still be barefoot in a field of daisies, only this time I want to feel the sun beat down on my skin and dance in the freedom and beauty of nature. I can be an artist, painting the canvas of my life. I can be a writer, words flowing on a page like honey or wine or rain. I can be a doctor (and God allowing, I will be). I can be a dancer, a singer, a friend, a daughter, a lover. I can be a woman, strong and independent, nurturing and sensitive. I can be a warrior, fighting for what I know in my heart, chasing my dreams past the end of the rainbow. But most of all, the person I can still be is me…the me that it has taken a long, long time to find. I can be the therapist in some moments, the patient in others. I can be the rock or the one who needs the shoulder to cry upon. I can be determined and driven, ambitious and persistent, creative and artistic, open-minded and free-spirited.

Who else can I still be? The world lays before me and the paths are endless…