One thing I’ve always had a hard time wrapping my head around is this: for the most part, things stay the same. For someone like me, whose life is consistently changing, growing, evolving, it is hard for me to realise that some things never change.
I always thought that when I moved yet again, when I was ripped out of the place I had become most comfortable and had to say goodbye to the people I was closest to, that everything would change. I thought that the place I was leaving would be a different place entirely if and when I ever came back to it. I thought my favourite corners; my streets of memories; my sentimental buildings would all crumble without me, their foundation to keep them standing. The truth is: life goes on.
I always assumed that when a life is lost, a truly beautiful, inspiring, innocent life sacrificed to such atrocities as cancer or time, that the world would never recover. I thought when the people I loved were lost that everything in everyone’s world had to change as everything in my world had just done. You might think this thought naïve but there is a word for this naïveté: egocentrism. It is the honest belief that everyone experiences the world as you experience it; that the things that are important to you must be important to everyone; that your sadness is everyone’s sadness and your happiness is everyone’s happiness.
I learnt about this term in a Developmental Psychology class. The exact phrase is ‘Adolescent Egocentrism’, and I think rightly so. One of the most eye-opening realisations you can come to as you grow up and fully begin to understand the world is that this is the furthest thing from the truth. No one experiences the world the same way you experience it, and that is what makes you so perfectly unique (and I truly believe unique is the best thing a person can be in this world). The things that are important to you are only important for that reason: you, if everyone held the same things to the same import everything would be considered important and in that, nothing would be. Your sadness is your own because the things that make a person sad are the things that make them who they are: what they care about, what affects them, what triggers emotion, these things are unique to everyone and that is what breeds diversified thinking. Likewise, the things that make a person happy, that truly appeal to them on a satisfactory level, that offer them comfort and joy both when they need it and when they don’t, these things define a person and must define each person individually.
For instance: the things that make me happy are good friends, good books, good science fiction and my boyfriend. My family, my writing, my travels, my studies, the list goes on! Obviously, these things will not be the same for everyone; my list of what makes me happy cannot make everyone else happy. And that is ok.
Suffice to say, I have come to realise that for the most part the things and places you leave behind when you go out to explore yourself are not what change: you are. Slowly, you begin to evolve out of adolescent egocentrism and appreciate that when you left high school that was the world you knew, but when you come back from college that world is exactly the same, you are the one that makes it different. You see the same halls you walked and streets you drove home on entirely differently than when you saw them before. You fit differently in your childhood bed that might be an inch too small now. You see a different view when you look out the window and imagine what is beyond the horizon.
When I left Trinidad I was young, impatient, and bored. I returned now two years later ready to bring my exploring home. I realised I know more about the various countries I have lived in that the one I was born in. When I realised this I realised that knowing that the places we explore never change brought me comfort. Every time I visit or re-visit somewhere I know that I will see the same place through new eyes, and knowing that now is yet another thing that makes me happy.
