Anonymous.

In the past I've always found comfort in being known or knowing the people I'm surrounded by.

My college was a small school in an even smaller town and by the time I graduated I couldn't even walk down the street without running into at least four people I knew by name. At first, when I would come back each year I found it, like I said before, to be kind of comforting. I enjoyed being a part of the "bubble."

Then I just felt a little suffocated by it. I couldn't buy orange juice without running into someone I knew, and usually it was just the person or the people I didn't want to run into. Inevitably I'd be wearing yoga pants, a hoodie, my old glasses (that are not quite as hip as my new ones), and my hair would be disheveled. Cute right? Not so much.

By the time I graduated from college I was starting to feel trapped by this tiny town that I had come to know as my home, and I felt like I had to move away before I ended up resenting it forever. So, I wrote it a little mental letter in my head:

Dear Durango, 

The past four years have been fun. We've laughed. I've cried. I grew up here, like really grew up. But now it's time for us, for me, to move on. I promise to write or to visit. You'll always have a little place in my heart and you'll always be my little home in the mountains. 

Love, 

Me

And I moved away. But I still had my little support system of friends and family pretty close by.

I don't have that now. At least not a car ride away. And at first that scared me a bit, but now I feel kind of freed by it. I walk down the street now, and people see a girl who looks like she's in college. They don't know my name, they don't know where I'm from, they don't know who I have or haven't dated, anything about me really except for what they see. And I like that. No labels, only brief assumptions.

My sister and I were taking a walk a couple of days before I left town and we were talking about how hard it can be to escape from our pasts sometimes. Or how hard it is to change the image that some people have of us. Someone could meet you in a weird stage of your life and think that you are a particular way, when really you are a whole other person. Or that stage was just a piece of the greater whole, not the whole itself. It's like wearing a "hello my name is" sticker that you didn't realize you were wearing and when you try to take it off, people still call you by that fake name.

But that got me thinking that in a way this anonymity has become a source of reinvention. I can try to become the best possible version of me that I can be and if I stumble, no one here will know the difference. I know this may sound strange and in fact, it probably doesn't make complete sense. But it doesn't have to make sense to everyone it just has to make sense to me.

So here's my little semi-conclusion: As I walk down the street surrounded by unfamiliar faces and backs of heads that I don't recognize I've discovered what it's like to be anonymous. Now, I see the beauty in anonymity and the beauty in reinvention that I never quite saw before.

                                                                           ~~~