My Island

I never like to leave the small island I grew up on. It’s my home, it’s been my home for as long as I can remember. It’s where my mom and dad met, where they got married, where I was born and where I was Baptist, where I had my first kiss, my first job. It’s where I can go, walk around and see my friends, my parent’s friends and my grandparent’s friends, grabbing their morning coffee or their daily donut at the Downy flake. It’s a place where I can go and feel safe in a world that doesn’t seem to like me very much. So I don’t like to leave the little sanctuary I've built very often.

My family has been on the island since the early 1940’s. My grandmother went out there to escape the war. She bought an old fisherman’s cottage about a mile down surfside road. Back in those days, Nantucket was uninhabited, she had one neighbor on her left and marshland on her right. The nearest store was 6 miles away, but for the island, that’s was pretty far. They still had the railroad then to get around, so every Sunday she would take it into town, collect her weekly rations and be on her way. It became her home, which later became my mother’s home, which later became mine. I grew up listening to her stories and as a bug eyed child longed for the day that I could go home again and start my own adventure.

We moved around a lot as a kid. After my dad left, it was just the three of us, my mom, my sister and I. He moved back out to the island to live with my grandparents and we ended up staying in North Andover, a town surrounded by highways and corrupt with drugs. So my mom did what her mom did before her, and sent us to the safest place she knew, Nantucket. By then my dad had started drinking heavily and couldn’t be bothers with his two little kids, so we spent most of our time with my grandmother. We were her babies, she love us just as much as we loved her. She taught me everything. How to sew, how to garden, how to get gum out of my hair when I accidently cut a huge chunk out and how to hide my bra strap in a dress that didn’t fit right. She was our world. When she died last October I was distraught, I had lost the only person, other than my mom, who thought I could be somebody one day. I was left disowned by my grandfather, shut out by real father with nowhere left to turn but back to My Island.

I moved out to the island on my own when I was 17. My grandmother sick and my grandfather unattached, I was unable to stay with them for the last time. So I did what I had to do. I lied about my age, I found a room to rent in the ice skating coaches house, packed up my little dolly mobile and moved out there. I had finally had a place on my own, making real money to support myself. I got a job at the local bike shop working on bikes and found out I was pretty good at it. Before that I had never really been good at anything other than being a screw up. I had a ton of people waiting to watch me fail, so I did the only thing I really know how to do, I proved them wrong. I went out my first summer spent five months on the island working as hard as I could, became really good at my job and by the time I left that summer, I had a win under my belt. For the first time ever, I wasn’t a screw up. There I was respected and looked to as a leader and a mentor. My past experiences helping me gain the confidence to get through the next year.        

But here, in the real world, I’m a nobody. I’m the girl who dropped out of high school, the girl who went to rehab, I'm the girl that nobody believed in. But this past year, I did something I never thought I would do, I went back to high school. And this time I am going to finish.

Leaving the island this year, I was terrified, for the first time in my life I had chance to change my path. No longer was my life going to be managing the local Cumberland farms or Stop&Shop.  It was college, it was my dream of becoming a teacher or a writer, starting to become a reality. For the first time I had someone other than my mom tell me I was going to amount to something someday. It’s a lot of pressure, but it’s the good kind, the kind that makes you want it more, and I’m honestly terrified. On Nantucket, I was a somebody, and now once again I’m a nobody. But that’s okay, because this time, I’m ready to become somebody again. But this time in the real world.