Stay Close To What Keeps You Feeling Alive

Originally written in July, 2016. Last seen as the original about me for youngandfullofrunning.com

*Cue uplifting theme music*

They say the best part about being young and adventurous is that the world is your oyster – which makes a lot of sense for me because I love lemons and putting hot sauce on everything. Sometimes, however, situations come to light that coerce the internal battle between being a mature adult and containing an abundance of wanderlust. Which brings me to here, an online site where I can showcase my writing and genuinely emanate some feels.

Hi, my name is Deanna and as I write this I am 24 years young (as if age matters because my maturity ranges from 17 to cranky grandma) and I love to write. Allow me to rephrase that: I love to share my repertoire of stories and beg people to read, but bare with me; people eventually say it's worth it.

Now let me weave you a tale!

To start, let’s rewind a little bit. Graduating college was like following a program. I chose an arbitrary degree, finished in four years, and voila! I was college educated and ready for my 60k salary plus benefits. Wrong. I had no idea what I was supposed to do next. The world seemed more like a tightly clamped clam than a flourished oyster and I had no tools or insight on how to open it.

I studied Marketing and Communications because I am drawn to things like relationships, cultures, birth order theory, and personality types. My parents refer to me as their wild-child. A thrill-seeker! An adrenaline-junky! And other hyphenated words that represent me as the typical attention-seeking middle child of a loud and proud Italian family. Needless to say I was born an entertainer and my college courses confirmed this fact; I forced my Writing and Producing Television classmates to cast me as the lead in our final production—they loved me, okay.

I chose to attend the University of Iowa partly because my older brother, Michael, had a memorable college experience there just five years before me. He told me fascinating stories of the friends he made, the trouble he got into, bar fights he witnessed, the drinking games he learned, etc. It was like a fairy-tale! I had to go there.

The other (main) reason I selected University of Iowa was due in part to my overwhelming thirst for creative writing. Fun fact: the charming town of Iowa City hosts the nation’s top ranked writers program, The University of Iowa Writers Workshop. Each semester I channeled my creative energy with writing classes such as: dramatic fictional prose, nonfiction and the memoir, fairytales and paradoxes, sketch-comedy analysis, screenplays, television production, and above all an independent capstone project which turned out to be the greatest challenge of my college career. I chose to transform a novel I had been working on in previous courses into a screenplay for a feature length film. It took me all semester and I cried a lot; if the movie were real it would be about 15 minutes long and worse than the Twilight Saga.

It was at the University of Iowa where I discovered my writing style, which I see as a combination of David Sedaris' circumstantial humor, John Mayer's metaphorical muse, and Mindy Kaling's witty candor; I'm as subtle as a shotgun. 

I was living the dream in Iowa City; a dream in which I was practicing one of my greatest passions and feeding my creative mind, something I’ve felt compelled to stay close to my entire life. 

My passion for creative writing and development derived from the bulky video camera my mom used to make home videos of my three siblings, Michael, Alyssa, Marco, and me. From opening presents on Christmas to family vacations and traveling on our sailboat, the camera captured it all. Being the total hams that we were, we couldn’t wait to get our grubby little paws on the footage to play it back and see how well we did. The attention was riveting; our very own brand of crack.

I was only eight when my parents divorced in 2000, and after that, those tapes meant more to me than my self-proclaimed acting career. It was an archive of my family. They were a replay of the time we spent together and the memories we shared.

In turn, my siblings and I continued to film our travels, and started to produce original projects from stories and scripts I would write. Thus a starlet was born!

Throughout my entire childhood and adolescence this passion for the creative arts burned so bright inside of my soul. No matter where life took me, I always found myself coming back to the magic of writing a good story. I grew up a raconteur and the University of Iowa helped me stay close to that.

I bunked up in Chicago after graduating in 2014 because I thought I should stay close to home. I started working in Real Estate because I've always been curious as to what the inside of people's houses looked like. But I never stopped writing. 

After spending two years in the gorgeous city, exploring the neighborhoods, making new friends, dating, discovering new hangouts and talents, dancing at bars, getting kicked out of bars for scaling the escalators, etc. I knew my time in Chicago was not satisfying me enough to quench my thirst for more. Something was missing and the emptiness hurt. My writing became dull and repetitive, and that killed me.

If you haven’t already gathered, I am not the type to work a nine-to-five desk job. I do not have the personality for it and it was never meant for me.  Yet there I found myself being swallowed whole by Corporate America, racking up 50-60 hours/week of demanding mental labor, and constantly questioning my very own existence. You can call that being over-dramatic all you want, but when my daily mantra repeated, “I don’t like this life,” I knew I had to make a change.

I needed to get out of my comfort zone and immerse myself in a memorable and noteworthy challenge. So I quit my job, decided not to renew my lease, and began to plan the ultimate adventure using what little savings I had scraped together.

Now, people called me spoiled and reckless and impulsive, but my thought process made sense. I spent thousands of dollars on a college education; beat me if try to put to use my hard-earned Writers Certificate doing what I love: writing and traveling. I’m trying to understand this world, damnit.

So, I called my dear friend and roommate throughout college, Madeline—someone I have trusted with my life since the day I met her as she charged towards my Joe Jonas poster I had hanging on the wall and tried to kiss it—just like that my search for answers came to an end.

Our timelines matched up between when my Chicago lease would end and when Madeline’s teaching contract in Ecuador expired. There is nothing I love more than a good star-alignment to tell me what to do. We decided to meet in Bogotá, Colombia the first week of October and backpack north to the Caribbean Coast, working for housing and living off the land (or at least our upper-middle class millennial version). 

Madeline and I had countless FaceTime sessions discussing our route and debating which outfits would fit into a 45L backpack. The whole time I envisioned the amazing footage I would acquire, the experiences I would share, the stories I would have. It all added up to one perfect story inside my head, The Bouyant Broads: two girls embark on a life-changing journey, bouncing from town to town in Colombia. I have time to workshop that one, anyway...

I know what you’re probably thinking, Deanna, you’re absolutely crazy. How do you, a privileged gringa from suburbia Illinois, expect to survive in the same country that Netflix's Narcos took place? I’m cautiously worried, too, reader. Also, that was a little rude. But may you beware that I thrive off of challenges, creativity, and fearlessness. My parents raised me to look after myself and to have street smarts and keep my wits about me – stuff like that.

In fact, this is all my parent's fault for teaching their children the value of travel and exploring the world. We grew up part-time on a sailboat on Lake Michigan, ferchristssake, how do you expect us Roselli kids to not be one with the earth, wind and waters? But with Mom’s loving worry, Dad’s lengthy stories laced with life lessons, my sister’s extensive travel knowledge, and my older brother’s law degree, I know I will be okay.

So here we are, all caught up! 

I think everybody needs to do this at some point in his or her life. Embark on a life-changing challenge, push yourself to do something wild, and meet a new part of you. It is all a reminder of what makes us happy, of what keeps that fire burning within our souls.

I look back on what made me happy: writing, traveling, reading, learning, teaching, entertaining, and the beauty of my experiences. I have to stay close to that.

Never forget to stay close to what keeps you feeling alive.