Playing It Safe

Prologue

jour·ney

ˈjərnē/

noun

an act of traveling from one place to another.

"she went on a long journey"

verb

travel somewhere.

"they journeyed south"

Twenty-one years ago, give or take some days, my mother decided to name her one and only bundle of joy Indie Journey Collins. Now I know what you are thinking that it is the most interesting name anyone ever thought of and honestly? You are right. My mother in her mid-twenties named her child after the one thing she wanted to do: travel. To be perfectly honest, I loved my name. It was wild and unkept like a weed or dandelion. It was everything that I was forced to be and everything I could never become.

Have you ever heard the saying the clothes make the man? By this they mean that an individual can look completely different by the way he presents himself, specifically how he dresses. As in it would be more likely for someone to find a man in a suit more attractive than a hobo wearing torn clothing. I felt my entire early adulthood like this also applied to my name. The name makes the man. By this I mean when I was born I already had a goal attached to my head. When my mom named me she put every hope she ever had into me. Every dream she had that was never realized now became my job to accomplish. This was already the first step of a life that would be planned out for me. The only real 'choice' I would have would be making sure the life people wanted me to have became reality. In this instance the stigma my name carried 'made the man' and anything I did of my own free will made me appear as the 'hobo,' the less desirable direction I could go.

At times when I hear people say my name this overwhelming feeling comes over me. It's the most difficult feeling to describe, however, the best way I can put it is that I feel as though I do not belong to myself. I feel like while I am in my body living a day to day life, I am living this life for someone else's purpose. I hear someone say my name and it does not register that they mean me. Because for me I am the zombie in my own body suppressing my wants and wishes for something else. The something else that is supposed to happen one day and magically make everything better. It's supposed to come along and solve everything and at that moment I will be able to live how I please. In Layman's terms I always did everything the way I was supposed to. I was President of almost every honor club at my high-school, I was captain of the cheer team, I graduated with honors and a 3.8 GPA. I got to go to college on a full ride scholarship and here I am now. In a normal persons eyes, I should be proud but in mine I was wondering when the life I wanted would actually begin. Right now, I was stuck in the most annoying phase of life. You're an actual adult yet at the same time you have no actual career and you aren't making the big money. I was free to do as I pleased but I did not have the freedom to be able to do as I pleased.

I hear my name I feel like a completely different person than the person I actually am. To my parents Journey is the girl with the good head on her shoulders. She is the child her parents brag about to their friends over dinner and wine parties. She is the one who, "Is going to do big things one day." Journey to my parents is the very definition of perfection. Journey to everyone else in my family is a lot less glamorous. She is always lacking somewhere. This Journey could be making more money than Bill Gates, Taylor Swift, and Kim Kardashian combined and she would still be just shy of perfect. This me was invisible and my accomplishments were never good enough. Journey to my friends was calculated. She always weighed the risks of whatever she did. She was mature.

I was a lot of things to a lot of people and each person's definition of who I was were all different. Every time I heard a person describe me or say my name I died a little more. Because with hearing them say Journey, the way they said it let me know everything they thought they knew about me. It let me know how they saw me and how they saw me was nothing more than another expectation I would have to live up to. My name had one real definition but it had fifty million different definitions in the eyes of others and twice the number of expectations.

I have never had a moment in my entire life where I felt like I really belonged to just myself. I never felt like I could be somewhere alone and really sit down and think about who I actually was. In all honestly, I do not think I do know who I am. I know what I like and dislike, but that is not all that makes up a person. I do not think that I would be able to figure out little things like if I was happy with my current relationship or just stuck going through the motions. In my mind I knew that I was because that's what everyone told me. How happy I looked with him, or how they expect to be invited to our wedding. In my head it all made sense. Because I should be happy. My heart was another issue. I kept my feelings to myself because being told your entire life by other people what you should feel and what should make you happy desensitizes you from what you actually want. I have never belonged to just myself, but at the same time I have never had a single moment in my life where I felt like I belonged anywhere. I grew up feeling like an outsider looking in. The clueless friend waiting to be let in on the joke everyone is already done laughing about. The older I got the worse it got until I eventually stopped trying all together. I would never belong perfectly anywhere, even while it seemed I belonged perfectly everywhere. I stopped trying to fit into the puzzle and forced myself into the puzzle instead. I was the piece of the puzzle that when pressed hard enough will fit and look like it was meant there, but if you take the time to back up and look at the entire picture you'd see a different story. The different story being that I was never meant to be there in the first place.

I guess you could say that is where this story really begins. More specifically how I realized that I can't make the pieces of my life fit into a puzzle I was never supposed to be a part of. My mother named me after her love for adventure and her need to be wild. It wasn't until later that I realized she planted the seed years ago. I found out that I belonged somewhere. It was not the place I was and it was no place I had been. It was different and unknown. It was wild and free. It was the complete opposite of everything I thought I had to be. It was past my cookie cutter perfect life. It was exciting.

The reality I eventually discovered was what people dream their lives were like. It ended up being full of adventure and recklessness. Full of nothing but pure living without a single care in the world. I hear my name now and I don't feel like dying anymore. I don't feel like I have to live up to everyone's expectations of me. I hear my name now from the mouth of friends, the guy I love, and new people I meet and it feels like I finally started living.

At birth my parents gave me the name they thought would fit every dream and hope they had for me. Twenty-one years later, I redefined my name and it finally became something with dreams and hopes behind it I could finally stand hearing.