Rocky had a teacher, I think it was in High School, that told him the most important secret of success I have ever heard.

     He said that after a kid graduates High School, he should put a compass point into the spot on the map where he lives, scribe a circle 200 miles scale around his home, and move outside that circle.

     I think that’s really good advice.  I took a year and stayed in my home town for the first year of college.  What a disaster THAT was.  But all my friends were there, and it seemed like a good idea to hang out with them.

     The thing is, that growing up is about change, and if you are surrounded by people who know you, in the same context where they knew you, you won’t change.  Their expectations and assumptions have a strange power.  It’s a little like gravity, pulling you down, keeping you on one plane.  It’s a little like inertia, holding you to rolling you along on a single-line straight course.  It’s a lot like friction, slowing you down.

     It wasn’t until after that first year of college, when I moved away and got married, that I really began to grow as a person.

     In high school, I was really just doing time.  I was waiting to be myself, waiting to think and do and be what I wanted to be.  Even when I was living more-or-less on my own, I still had the responsibilities of school, and the care of a quadriplegic to deal with.  One does not spread ones wings and become a beautiful butterfly with no spare time, and only $35/week disposable income.  Not even in the early-to-mid-eighties.

     But I bided my time, made the most of what outlets I could (I’d say about equal parts hooliganism, meditation, and intense martial arts/weight training).  I was biding my time waiting for that magic day when I would turn 18, become an adult, and be able to do and be and think and say whatever I wanted to.

     What I learned in that year in Bemidji post-high-school, is the true meaning of the phrase “You don’t need to put a lid on a bucket of crabs.”

     See, if you have a bucket full of crabs, they all lock onto each other, climb over each other, and basically hold each other down, locked in place.  I don’t know if it’s actually true about crabs or not, but it is certainly true about people.

     That first year I had fun with my close friends, but I realize now that the sense of discontent I had was due to the fact that I was still waiting to be able to be myself.

     There were a million things I saw myself doing:  being a physical therapist, and helping people regain their lives after tragedy strikes, being a veterinarian and helping sick and injured animals get better, becoming a biologist and a pilot and going to Alaska to study life-forms in a pristine ecology, becoming a writer and living in an efficiency apartment in New York city with no furniture except a typewriter on a desk in the middle of the livingroom surrounded by pizza boxes and old Chinese take-away cartons – writing The Great American Novel (only probably with aliens, or maybe ninjas).

     I even thought I might become a forensic scientist and give Quincy a run for his money.

     One thing I was NOT going to do was the thing that just about every adult had told me I was going to do from the time I can remember beginning to talk to adults – get married and have kids.

     Oddly enough, it took getting swept off my feet and married and moving away to give my life the jump-start that it needed.  I found that in the cities, people didn’t think they already knew who I was because of my last name, the church my family attended, or my address.  They would ask me what I thought instead of assuming.  They asked me what I wanted as if that made a difference.

     I studied, learned, worked, and the only person in the area who knew me was Rocky, and he didn’t seem to have any ideas of how he wanted me to be.

     Jump forward a few years, and I’ve got a degree in English and History from the University of Minnesota.  I’ve got a three-year-old kid, and I’m back in Bemidji with my husband and close friends for the class reunion.

     And all anyone has to say to me is “Oh my GOD!  I can’t believe how much you’ve CHANGED!  You’re so DIFFERENT!  You seem so calm, not so – um- intense.”

     Meaning I’m not as surly, cynical, fatalistic, or self-destructive.

     But it hit me:  I never WAS what they saw when they looked at me.  That was just what I was doing while I waited for a chance to really be myself.

     They saw that I had make-up on, and that was so DIFFERENT.  Well, I was not someone who didn’t wear make-up.  I was someone whose parents didn’t allow her to wear make-up, and whose peers made a big deal about how ugly she was because she didn’t wear make-up, and who decided to not wear make-up just to show them how little their opinion meant to her.

     They saw that I was wearing a nice, fashionable name-brand dress that you couldn’t even buy in Bemidji, and that was so DIFFERENT.  Well, I was not someone who didn’t make a trip to the cities to shop for school clothes; I was someone whose parents didn’t take her to the cities to shop for school clothes, and who decided to be completely indifferent to clothes just to show people how stupid they were for thinking it had anything to do with who I was.

     But what struck me as funny, about half-way through the evening, was that even though they hadn’t SEEN me ten years ago when I was in highschool with them – they really thought I had changed because they didn’t SEE me now.

     I was just being me, and they still didn’t get it.  They were just trying to move me to a different place in the same bucket – so to speak.  Same play, different role.

     The best conversation I had that night was with a girl I’d hardly ever talked to.  We’d been in some of the same classes together.  College prep classes the guidance councilor never thought I belonged in, and always tried to steer me away from.

     She had always gotten good grades, but had never really found her passion.

     Turns out, it’s because she was a science geek deep down, but a popular girl’s girl on the surface.  She always knew that her friends would never accept her if they knew.  So she buried it.

     Then, she moved away, and discovered Geology in college, and it was liberating for her.  She loved it.  Passionately.  She told me that she’d always envied me for my ability to do whatever I wanted, and just be myself, and not care what anyone ever thought of me, and now that she could do it for herself, she felt completely free and fulfilled.  I just smiled and thanked her, figuring that if the illusion made her life better, who was I to burst it?

     I would say definitely, the best thing you can do to jump-start your personal growth is to take a compass, jam the point into the place on the map where you grew up, scribe a 200 mile circle around it, and don’t go back to live there until you know who you are.