I used to hate being in California, mostly because of what it symbolized: frivolity that I felt I couldn't partake in, parents that didn't understand me, and friends I couldn't be myself around. All of that has somewhat gone away, ten years later. I'm trying to accept my "serious" side and nonexistence of frivolity, I realize that my parents are human, and I now only see friends I can be myself around. Problems solved?
Yet time and time again, I never fail to lose patience with my parents or show the hard-headed side of myself. In June, my mom came to visit me in New York by herself, and in the dark, as we lay side by side, she recalled a plea from my brother before her trip that she please just go with my plans without resistance. I was staring at the ceiling as she spoke, and I could tell she was too. She drew an outline in the air with her two pointer fingers, saying that I think like a box and nothing can go outside of its parameters.
After several years of requests, I finally dug through my belongings left in my parents' home. It came down to two shoe boxes (notes, letters, cards from friends since elementary school to college), and one bag full of notebooks (14 years' worth of diaries). I can throw out most material things but not chronicles or correspondence. I briefed through some letters and cards. Many from friends I don't speak with much anymore, or from relationships that have changed. All felt like it was my premature decision, to halt them, rather than a natural decline of friendship. I felt loved for that relationship, and guilty for its demise.
I flipped through some diaries. I documented everything, both mundane and monumental. My grandmother's funeral in 2000. My first, exhilarating AOL Instant Messenger chat with Christine Lee. Boys in which I had years-long crushes on. My relationship with God. Things that I wanted and never got and hated my parents for. My urgent desire to move to New York. My college diary itself was a transformation of 18-year-old Elizabeth Thoughts versus 21-year-old Elizabeth Thoughts, a period in which I consider the start to true self-actualization. Realizing only in retrospect, that my own writing revealed how much I struggled being an Individual and being okay with that. How going to a college that made me feel like an alien just by physically being there made me want to embrace myself further simply as a defense.
Do my parents know how much I've changed? At my worst behavior, I used to think my mother must think I'm bipolar. How depressive and bitchy I was at home, but how involved I could be at church or at school. Why, after nearly a decade of transformation and self-realization, do I still struggle being patient with my aging parents? Sometimes I think patience has less to do with it than validation. That if I just was validated, I wouldn't push so hard.
