If I Knew Then by Jann Arden

Author:Jann Arden [Arden, Jann]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House of Canada
Published: 2020-10-27T00:00:00+00:00

6. Wear your crown to Walmart.

When my mother was alive, I asked her if she ever thought about being young again. I also asked her, if she could go back in time, would she?

She told me she liked where she was now. Being young was hard, she said, because she didn’t know anything. “Everything seemed so big when I was young, and when you get older it all seems smaller and more manageable.”

Benjamin Button was on to something, I think. Start out old and get younger, bringing all your knowledge with you as you go. If I knew then. Alas. I don’t know a single person who doesn’t wish they’d known the things they know now when they were just starting out. I always say to my friend Theresa that I am surprised we are still alive, because we did so many stupid things. For reals, we say things to each other like this one she says to me: “Remember that time you fell out of your Corvair and your mom had to drive us home and it would only go in reverse?” (A Corvair is a very weird car from the 1960s. I bought one for two hundred bucks when I was sixteen and, yes, I did fall out of that car and lived to tell the tale.)

In interviews I’m often asked, “What would you tell your younger self?” I’ve given different answers over the years. In my thirties, I leaned towards cautioning my younger self to skip certain parts. Avoid this and go around that. And for God’s sake, don’t do…

My answer now is so much easier.

Jann, I’d say to my younger self, you’re going to go through a giant shitstorm. You’re going to be very hard on yourself and feel ashamed and embarrassed. You’re going to question your sanity and your worth and your sexuality, and pretty much every decision you’re going to make is going to be difficult. You’re going to doubt all of it. You’re going to spend years being desperately hungover, and you’re going to fail epically, but you’re going to make it—you’re going to thrive, even. I wish I could take away the hard parts, Jann, but then you wouldn’t be me, and being me is super fucking great.

When I think about Allan Reid being dumped and changing his mind about my music in that crazy moment, I shake my head. I marvel at all the unseen bits of whimsy floating through the air that we forget about because we’re too busy planning. How in the world could I have ever planned that? Allan sure didn’t plan for that. As much as he changed my life, I changed his. We still talk about it to this day—the absurdity of the chain of events and how random it was and yet how deliberate it seemed all in the same breath.

You have to keep going forward even if that forwardness is kind of sideways—sometimes backwards. Things stop working when you stay still. You’ve got to keep moving, listening to that inner voice that dares you to be more than you are.

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