“They saved my life.”

You hear people say it all the time.

Soulmates go on and on about how closely intertwined they are and about how dull their lives were before meeting this said person. They say they saved each other, that they wouldn’t be wherever they are without this person being in their life. I should know. I’m watching it happen before my eyes.

WATCHING OTHERS MEET THEIR SOULMATES

A little over a year ago my brother met the woman he wants to marry. And he never wanted to marry anyone. So watching her existence change his outlook on life has been one of the most startling and beautiful things that I have ever seen. Not only does he want to get hitched and have kids, but he uses retinol. Retinol. We’re talking about a guy who never even washed his face. Now he has a four step skincare routine that she’s got him on. He’s glowing. From his newly found moisturizer, no doubt, but also from love. My big brother, the one who swore all of that stuff off years ago and told me the grandkids are my sole responsibility to produce, is in icky, sicky, feed-each-other-bites-of-food love.

What I’m getting at here is this: it has become clear to me that once you meet that person your whole life changes irrevocably. Your existence becomes bound up with someone else’s. You’re not alone anymore. And that’s all good and great for a lot of obvious reasons. I don’t need to explain, our culture announces it to us everyday. I mean, we’re conditioned practically from birth that there is someone out there for us and that we will magically lock eyes with them across a crowded room one day and then that will just be it. Soulmate found. Cue the happily ever after. And that’s fine. Flawed by design and not completely accurate, but life is hard. Let me just believe in this one thing right?

That’s not what I’m interested in.

THE BEAUTIFUL BEFORE

What I am interested in is the before. Because that’s what I know, that’s the time I’m in right now. And it’s also the thing that doesn’t get talked about in a positive light very often. No matter what, being alone is still seen as the lesser state of being. When really, I think it’s kind of sacred.

My senior year yearbook quote was “these are the days that must happen to you” by Walt Whitman. Which, if you knew how angsty and depressed I was that year, is pretty funny. Every other kid was keeping it lighthearted and fun and then there was me, always fitting in. It’s also just still such a great quote. I bring it up here because I feel that it applies to my life now more than ever. I’m navigating my last year in college and in San Diego before my life changes dramatically. It’s easy to look to the future and bank all of your happiness on it. We do it all the time. And here specifically, I am arguing that we do it in terms of finding someone.

But there is something so special about right now. Not in some trippy hippie, be in the now kind of way, but in the very basic, down to earth, you’re a whole human being already kind of way.

I like to see it like this:

Right now, I’m in my twenties. I don’t have a ton of friends, there’s no one around that you could pay me to on a date with, and most days I am alone, reading and writing under the sun. I go to coffeeshops and art galleries. I spend hours walking around the city. I try new recipes. I sit on the beach and watch the sunset with my journal open. I wash fresh strawberries and eat them under the blue sky. I talk to strangers in the grocery store. I watercolor bare foot and write poetry and plan summer rendezvous with New York. I dance barefoot all over the kitchen floor with a bowl of cookie dough on my hip. I geek out over my term papers. I fall in love with my professors. I tell the girl in the bathroom that I like her earrings. I plan the next year of my life. I dream of Brooklyn. And sometimes, every now and then, I stand back and see all of these things. I see the person I am becoming and the life that I am living and I get this feeling, like these are sacred days that I’m going to tell someone all about one day. Because even if they don’t feel like much now, I know that they matter more than I can possibly know. For if you cut me open and looked inside, you would find all of these things. They’re me, as I am today.

And the best part is, I do them all alone. I do them quietly, lost in thought, paying deep attention to the world around me in a way that I just can’t do when with someone else.

Don’t get me wrong, experiencing the world with someone is great for its own reasons. But we’re not talking about that. We’re talking about the long days of being young and alone, when all of your people are two cities too far away and the world gets very quiet. We’re not really told that those days matter, but they do. They are the ones that allow you to be receptive to your environment and to yourself. They are the ones that show you who you really are, when there is no one around to tell you. Your sense of self gets forged steel on those days, and that’s something no one can ever take from you.

So before you meet your person, notice all the ways in which you are getting to meet yourself. Notice what a funny, strange, lovely little human that you are so that when you do meet those beautiful people in which you are destined to spend your life around and they ask who you are, you will have everything to say.

JOIN THE FUN

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