(This article is strongly inspired by the movie Lady Bird, which I warmly recommend to anyone: no matter where you come from.)
Art has this unique capability to make the most normal story of a life seem full of magic and transcendence. It lets you know that what you feel is not strange, it is perfectly normal and you’re not alone with it. You’re surely not the last person in the world feeling like coming from Nowhere. You definitely cannot choose where you come from, but you can still choose where you go from there. And maybe even most importantly, if you ever come back.
I remember being young in my small hometown and feeling constantly like drowning, sitting at my desk at home and being in dire need of water, but finding only air. Thinking that I am wasting my life where I am because such a place could never possibly let anybody spread their wings. I remember the overwhelming conviction that absolutely nothing could ever happen in a place like my hometown. Like I am missing so much while being stuck there. Like real life is happening somewhere far from here, and I am being excluded from so many important, glorious things.
This is a good and a bad thing. It makes you feel slightly homeless, maybe even rootless, but it also gives you a tremendous injection of determination to run, run as fast and as far as possible. And hell yeah, I did run. The first years of my independence were the time of a simple, basic life filled with an insane joy over smallest things and the freshly gained ability to breathe in deeply. I enjoyed the space around me, I collected new impressions and I simply took it all in. I learned to praise my freedom more than anything and I realized that independence will be forever the most basic condition for my happiness.
Still, after all those years of moving, running, drawing circles, I know that real, important things happen everywhere. I know people who live in the middle of nowhere and live their life to the fullest. I know it all depends. But for me, coming from Nowhere, I really felt like I had Everywhere to go. And I think it was something good. (I wrote last year already about the luxury of choosing where to go.)
Lady Bird is a girl who comes from Nowhere and decides to go Somewhere, only to realize that Nowhere was Somewhere all along. I still haven’t got to this point, but who knows what life will bring next.
You never know what’s around the corner. It could be everything. Or it could be nothing. You keep putting one foot in front of the other, and then one day you look back and you’ve climbed a mountain.
Originally published at medium.com