On "taking the long way round" and "being cookie dough"

Or, "How it seems my posts will involve quotes from things."

I was walking to work the other morning listening to music on my mp3 player, "The Long Way Round" by The Dixie Chicks came on. (What can I say, I love them!) Every time I hear them - or at least that CD of theirs - I go back to summer of 2006, my sister, mum and I in a rented BMW in Germany, driving down from Munich airport into Austria for my second cousin's wedding.

"Six strong hands on a steering wheel"

It was the summer after. A year after dad died, a year after my sister had moved out.... and only a couple of months after I was so convinced I'd flunked my maths finals that I withdrew from my place at King's College in London, and decided to move to Cape Town for a year.

And as I walked towards the office on Monday morning, the song came on, and I just let myself laugh. Because yes. The lyrics? Yes. 

"I've been a long time gone now,
Maybe someday, someday I'm going to settle down.
But I've always found my way somehow
By taking the long way round"

I had to move to the other end of the world from home at 17 to figure out I could decide what I wanted out of my life; and ended up not living in London but in a tiny town way up North, not studying maths and philosophy, but molecular biology and philosophy. Not a degree that would get me hired easily necessarily, but one I thought I wanted - and greatly enjoyed.

"Well I fought with a stranger and I met myself,
I opened my mouth and I heard myself"

One of the last bits of encouragement my dad gave me was "trust your voice: you have things to say," so of course I always think of him when I hear that line.

"It can get pretty lonely when you show yourself
Guess I could have made it easier on myself "

I could have made many things easier for myself I am sure, if I had stuck to a nice, cosy straight road. To the familiar, to the safety and comfort of what is familiar. And I did, for quite a while, in some aspects of my life.

But I have discovered that that is not who I am; and the truth is, I wouldn't have it any other way.

For instance, I could have ended up in my current career in a far more straightforward way, even straight out of high school. I would be qualified by now. Instead, I finished high school early, moved across the world where I met the most fabulous people and started asking more serious questions about God, moved Up North for university, did a strange degree, met more fabulous people, went completely bat-shit-crazy, took spontaneous trips back to the other side of the world, stood up in church for a God who loves me, feel in love with a boy, got better, met more amazing people, played around with chemicals in a lab for a while, realised a trained chimp could do so, decided to stay and do more philosophising, talked my way into a job in a book store, quit the job at the book store because I realised my family was more important to me, finished philosophising with no clue what I wanted to do next, thought I'd try out this whole accountancy business because being paid to dress pretty and be nosy and play with numbers and back up figures seemed fun, left the boy, took 8 months interning before I started this job, which allowed me to travel around like a crazy person, and started this training not as an 18-year-old, but as a 20-something with two degrees who is still 'taking the long way round' but feels like she is exactly where she is supposed to be.

Because that is the truth: I feel like I am exactly where I am meant to be, but I also have this sneaky feeling that it is still "the long way round" to wherever it is I am going. Incidentally, I do not know where that is; which leads us to the whole 'being cookie dough' thing.

I recently re-watched the whole of season 7 of Buffy - as you do - and I laughed, again, when Angel and Buffy have an exchange in the cemetery in which Buffy refers to herself as cookie dough. I loved that exchange when I watched it over 9 years ago when it first aired (sidenote: OH MY GOODNESS!), but it meant a lot more to me now that I am around (older!) than Buffy was meant to be at that point, because: "I'm cookie dough. I'm not done baking. I'm not finished becoming whoever the hell it is I'm going to turn out to be!"

For now, I am cookie dough, and that is just fine.