Follow Your Own Heart, Not the Person You Gave It To.
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As a young girl, I always thought that following your heart meant following the person you gave your heart to.
And believe me, I’ve chased that notion to all ends of the country and beyond, thinking those beautiful lost boys — those seeming Peter Pan incarnations — could guide me on an endless adventure through Neverland.
California. New York. Canada. BFE Arkansas. Colorado. You name it, and I’ve followed some beautiful lost boy with a burning enigma dancing in his eyes and unquenchable thirst for adventure in his soul out there.
All of those adventures have never failed to end the same: blunt, beastly, and bitterly disappointing.
The lost boys are all interchangeable, as every single story is strikingly parallel; they all present themselves as a promise of adventure, become a tourist in my life, guide me somewhere new and exciting, then run away and force me to slowly creep down the unforgivable path of loneliness back home.
This abandoned aftermath never fails to penetrate every inch of my existence, and always leaves me in an unyielding identity crisis where I’m forced to find myself again beneath the wreckage.
I can still remember the sheer terror, the desperate heartbreak felt when I realized that Peter Pan was just a fairy tale, a childhood fantasy that I had carried into my adulthood.
Peter Pan isn’t real.
He was just my childhood dream of a beautiful boy, the one who would grab my hand and scoop me away to Neverland forever. In my fantasies, we would run away without a care in the world together.
But Peter Pan is just another lost boy.
I was sitting in one lost boy’s tent as the ground shook with the heaviest bass my body had ever experienced and strobe lights flashed through my closed eyes when I realized the truth behind the Peter Pan fallacy.
It was a combination of a heavy dose of reality and an overindulgence in party favors that made my stomach grow nauseated and eyes fill with tears.
He was just another lost boy.
However, that bitter dose of reality through heartache turned into one of the greatest blessings that I have ever received through an earth-shattering epiphany:
Only the passion in my heart is real.
The lustful aching for adventure in his soul,
The coveted mystery glowing in his eyes,
They were always just a reflection of myself that I saw in every lover I ever chose.
Now, as I’m blossoming into a young woman, and after years of chasing my heart to all ends of the country and beyond, I’ve realized that it was never a person I was following.
All of these years I’ve been passionately following my own dreams of adventure that were reflected back to me through different lovers. I have found relentless inspiration, even through the heartache, while doing this.
Peter Pan is just a metaphor for my love affair with adventure.
I’ve come to realize that following your heart actually means something quite different than following a person. My heart is mine, and it is in love with all of the beauty and undiscovered intricacies of the world. My heart is young, wild and free.
I can’t wait to see where it takes me next.
I may adventure off with many more lost boys in the future, but my heart is the real Peter Pan.
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Jacki Moon is a writer, dreamer and yogi with a rebel soul who currently resides in Colorful Colorado. While she has been a writer for as far back as her memories go, she began taking the craft more seriously in her undergrad years when she got into music journalism. Her ‘Almost Famous’ dreams and hopeless romantic spirit have taken her on many adventures across the nation, and have opened her heart to a love affair with the unknown. She invites you to join her on Twitter to keep up with all of her crazy antics.
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