�Devote six years to your work but in the seventh year go into solitude or among strangers so that your friends, by remembering what you were, do not prevent you from being what you have become.� - Leo Szilard

It�s necessary to get away sometimes, to find out who you can be. When I was 21 years old I moved to Los Angeles to find out who I was. A few years later, with only a bit of an idea, but closer than I�d ever been before, I moved back to San Diego. The friends I made in L.A. are still my friends (that is, the few who made it through my tri-monthly �cleaning-house� routine). Sometimes I toy with the idea of moving to the East Coast for a few years. To REALLY GROW. Away from the network of friends and nuclear family, away from the known dramas and that whole, enmeshed way of living.

I wonder who I could become. I wonder how people will see me, people who have no idea who I have been , where I came from. People with no history to go on. That is the only way to find out what you have become, new opinions, fresh eyes. I�ve always been obsessed with change. Something that is so bitter and shocking for so many, I find sweet and savory. I never got a simple trim, I always chopped it all and drastically changed the color. I would submerge myself in new hobbies and tire quickly of them. This attitude towards change has its ups and downs. I like NEW, I like DIFFERENT.

So I think a new city, when I�m done with school and when my balls have reached the right size, would be grand. I don�t just want to speculate about the person I could be. I want to BE that person. Basically, I want to be more ME, the me-est I can be. Sometimes, we need to break away from other people�s perception of the �me� we may be to become the �me� that we really are.

Sounds like a divine project! Every day I wish to be more like me. Who, exactly, that is will reveal itself to me with hard effort and in good time. For now, I will simply work on breaking away from all the old �me�s I no longer want to be, and all of the people who insist on knowing ONLY those old "me"s.

-Barbarella

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