When I was 22

Here's an email I wrote to my mother on October 21, 2002, shortly after I graduated from college:

Right now what's making me feel good is being here in California with my friends and community and mentors and worldview-bending conversations with wildly diverse people that are helping shape my life and my choices more than any institutionalized class ever could. Of course I have the potential to be led astray or get freaked out or join a cult or waste all my money or get into bad substances or do stupid things, but you just have to have faith that I am a free agent, a relatively intelligent and motivated one who loves life and tries to think freely and live healthfully, and I'll make decent decisions. Maybe not the best, maybe not the ones you would have chosen, and maybe you won't see the rhyme or reason to the path that my heart follows. But no one ever promised me or you that things would make sense right away.

Mr. Thoreau dabbled in pencil manufacturing for years before he found his path and sat down by a lake and "frittered his life away" writing silly little stories that would later profoundly influence Gandhi and his subcontinent. Thomas Paine worked as a corset-maker for years before he sailed to new lands and wrote books that fomented the revolution that formed the country we now live in. Roald Dahl hiked aimlessly around Newfoundland and then took a post in humid, malaria-infested Africa before he joined the Royal Air Force and later wrote children's books that we all grew up on. I admire these people far more, and their lives make my eyes shine brighter, than whoever was the richest or most powerful man in Concord while Thoreau was eating lunch with his mom by a lake. That's just how I am. I value freedom and adventure more than security and institutional validation. And not everyone who's like that ends up as a miserable failure, and I'm lucky enough and educated enough and have a degree to fall back on, so I can follow a non-traditional path and probably not crash and burn. Why not? Who am I hurting, living this way?

My eyes are finally shining for something, I feel less lonely and repressed. And in any case, if it doesn't work out in the next few years, then I'll be only, what, 26 years old? Not too late to start over, wiser and humbler and full of stories.

I'm probably not going to influence nearly as many people as any of these men, but nonetheless, I want to forge a life less ordinary, a life off the beaten track, a life with heart if not with loads of cash and real estate. And I have enough friends all over the world that I'll never starve. And I live healthy enough that I'm not making myself sick all the time. Insurance is not going to do a lot of good if the shit really hits the fan, but a huge network of friends will. That's my insurance. And it's a lot more fun than selling my time to someone I don't care about and giving it to someone else I don't care about in the name of "security." And it's partly because I have all these friends who live more "secure" lives that I can afford to live like I do. But many of them seem to enjoy my stories and my presence enough for me to be worth having around and occasionally helping out. I'm young and naive and glib, and it may catch up with me, and I may have to start over years in the future when it's not so easy. But that's what I choose for now, the uncertainty and the adventure.

I only have this one life. It's just the way I am, and I'm not exhorting anyone to live like I do. I'm not even asking for permission or acceptance or respect. Just... give me a chance, and let me fail and succeed gracefully, as a human being as cognizant and imperfect as any other.

I'm 22 years old. I'm a freshman in the world, and I'm going to make mistakes. But that's the only way I'll learn. I think it was you who introduced me to the Tallulah Bankhead quote: "If I had my life to do over, I'd make all the same mistakes, only I'd make them a lot sooner."

So here I go.