Naomi

Sitting in the kitchen, I said I felt like doing a handstand, but a few minutes later I’d lost that desire. I said out loud, “Five minutes ago I wanted to do a handstand, but now I don’t.” Everyone was like “cool story bro,” but actually it was? I’d never done a handstand before, but I was fully prepared to stride to the hallway and give it a try. As soon as I had the thought to do it, I truly believed I could. But that belief vanished as quickly as it had arrived, so I stayed where I was. I used to have a ballet instructor who liked to say, “Don’t worry if you can’t do it, try anyway.” Isn’t everything about intention?

There’s a girl I used to know, my age, who recently got engaged. When you scroll through her Facebook wall, it is full of engagement-related posts: engagement-party photos, congratulations from other people, statuses relating to her fiancé. I don’t know how long it will be until they are actually married, but fuck me, to imagine myself in that position is impossible! I glance over my own wall and see a very different life in a different city. While she is marrying her long-term boyfriend, seemingly content to spend most of her time with only him in the city she was born in, I want the complete opposite. I want even more freedom than I have now. I want MORE.

I think it’s healthy to project fantasies on people—new people, not just one person. Fantasies are our stories. In my friday lecture, the professor explained how the whole of society is just a bunch of stories. And the stories in our heads are intentions. And nothing would happen if we didn’t have intentions at all. Maybe we TELL ourselves to love, to do things, because it would make a good story.

But my intention is not to settle, not to get engaged or even think about it. I mean, of course I’ve thought about it, I’ve invented a story in my head—one among many. But my intention is for more. I need to remember that. And intention is just the start. ♦