Our friends and family are the people who we count on to make us smile and laugh, making life more enjoyable. Growing up with them around usually causes influence on our perceptions, our concepts, and our demeanour towards life. The people we frequently keep close to us are the people who help and encourage us to be who we are. So who do we become, when they’re no longer around?
For Jennifer Thomson, moving to a small town was less of a personal choice and more of a necessity to kick start her career as a Creative Writer. In the radio broadcasting industry, small market media outlets are where you get your feet wet, make your mistakes, and learn more than you could ever possibly be taught in school. It’s where rookies learn everything the hard way, tough it out, and fine-tune themselves to master their craft with the hopes of one day finding themselves amongst all-stars and legends.
Just a quick two weeks after officially accepting my job, I found myself completely alone in my very first apartment. On my own for the very first time, I now lived in a small community where I didn’t know a single soul and everything I had ever known was 8 hours away. The bustling city life I had grown up with, the vivacious type of life I had shared with those I loved the most and everything that I had ever really known didn’t exist here. I was in a smaller world, very different than the one I grew up in. Along with the challenge of starting a new job, I would have to familiarize myself with my unknown setting. For the first time in my life, I had to essentially start over and create a new sort of life for myself.
Go back to that first day of school; elementary, high school, even college. You’re in a new setting, among a mass amount of unrecognizable faces. Everyone around you knows nothing about you, you know nothing about them; they just go along doing their own thing, as do you. You can only hope that in time you’ll find someone who shares common interests with you or that you’ll find people who can make the fresh start comfortable and slightly more tolerable. You can only hope that you’ll find a way to share the experience, instead of having to endure it on your own.
Although I desperately wanted to maintain my persona of being the girl from a big city, I was eventually forced to let go of the life that I had always known and loved. The excessive choices in entertainment and the assorted number of options to keep me busy were no longer available to me anymore and I had to learn to make do with what was. Instead of driving through the city and spending time at the mall like I used to, I became accustomed to spending free time reading books at the park, hiking the mountains, or taking scenic bike rides. I would spend lonely evenings by the river engulfed by small town silence or at my special hillside spot, looking upon the town at night in an effort to find comfort in the reminiscent twinkling lights. I even made effort to attend local community events and festivals – something I hardly made time for when I lived in Vancouver because I was too distracted by other things to do. My favourite friends and family members became just voices or words on screens; although on occasion, web-chat reassured me that there was an actual person to associate with the phone calls and visual communications. With the absence of everyone I held dear to my heart, I had to befriend local comrades and create relationships with the people around me, despite them not being anything like the friends I had left back at home.
Disconnected from my former life and forced to take on the world by myself, I re-discovered the soul behind the name, Jennifer Thomson. After spending many long days of many interesting months with myself, I became a new person. Without distractions of a busy city, I learned to appreciate the little things in life that mean the most. I developed an awareness for all the things I used to take for granted and began to acknowledge everything and everyone I loved with more passion. As I faced a new way of life and turned over new leafs, I realized that the life I had been living before, wasn’t all that I had always thought it was. There had never been anything wrong with it, but under new light it seemed stale and stagnant. Before I had moved to this small town, I had always just gone with the flow of things, accepting each day as it was instead of making it into what I wanted it to be.
Jennifer Thomson had moved to a small town with the sole intention of using this opportunity to move on to bigger, better things. In that span of several months, not only did I create solid foundations to my future success, but I managed to find myself in the truest form. Living life on my own, alone with my own thoughts and without influence of familiar people, I managed to discover the potential I had to be someone better.
There’s nothing wrong with who you are right now, in this very moment. Those who love you and keep you close do so for the very reasons you currently exude. But, there’s always room for improvement and every day of our lives is another opportunity to make the most out of who you are. Whether you have an opportunity to live life in a new environment or away from all the things that associate with who you are today, find a moment to spend some quality time with yourself and understand who you really are. It’s the precious moments of spending a little “me, myself, and I” time that make us realize our promise, our possibility, and the potential we have be to our very best for the big things still to come.
