Die Teilzeitnomadin

The Movie Moana fascinates me. The songs are swirling in my mind. Usually, when I can listen to them, they vanish in my mind. But it didn’t help that a friend of mine gave me the soundtrack. I love the story – although it’s not new – of a girl finding her destiny, a girl who struggles between what her village or her father expects her to do and her inner voice.

Some people say, it’s the first Disney movie with a strong princess who’s not longing for a lover. Okay, it’s maybe the first princess movie without even a potential prince, but also in Brave the girl is looking for her own destiny without somebody else telling her what to do. And she definitely doesn’t want to get married. Same struggle, different settings,

Maybe that’s why I love both movies so much. It corresponse to my own struggle in life. Not that there is anybody who wants me to do or be something I don’t want. But I have images in my mind, how my life should be with 30, how I want to be as a grown up. But those ideas didn’t come true. So I’m struggeling between my own selfbuilt images and the real situation and the knowledge, that some parts are not meant to be. That’s what draws me to those movies. And the feeling or the wish of those heroines that there is more in life than the setup that is spread in front of them. The curiousity to cross borders, to sail to the horizon and see what’s behind. I can physically imagine the power of the sea that pulls Moana to the shore or that guides Merrida to the top of the mountain.

I grew up with my favourite movies being Disneys Robin Hood and Muppets Treasure Island. Somehow this had an impact on my life: a strong sense of justice and a longing to find treasures and to explore the world, to cross the horizon. But those stories have a male protagonist and I always wondered as a child why there was no female. Now there are those princesses that take their destiny into their own hands instead of complaining. They change their fate and follow their inner voice, their dreams. I’m at the other side of the world, I crossed the horizon to make my dream of travelling come true. I feel a connection to those fictional characters (strangely enough they are all created by men). Maybe that’s why I still hear Monana’s song in my mind. I am on an island that is said to be pulled out of the sea by Maui, I follow tracks that not everybody went and devour the beautiful landscape around me. Still there is the struggle, my own fight, not between the wishes from my parents and myself, but between my selfconstructed plan of life that is not going to happen. At least not soon. I don’t have a job, I don’t have my own family and I don’t know what the future will bring.

But maybe that is something that those movies show us, too: nevertheless how many pincesses find their real destiny, there are still a lot of them to come. After each overcoming of a struggle, crossing of a horizon, climbing up a mountain, there is still the next one waiting. A never ending story.

And even that I became this adventurous woman who travels the world on her own, a woman I always longed to be, there is more I want to accomplish, more things I want to learn, to see, to become. And instead of sitting down and be sad about lost chances and shattered dreams (what I do often enough), I should collect myself and take the fate into my own hands, working for my dreams come true. Even if I can’t be a 27year old mother travelling the world with my young children and my partner, it’s just the age that is gone, not the rest of that dream.

And a few days ago, I overheared a conversation between two young women, 20 something. One of them said: „You don’t really know, if you made the right choice in your life. You just browsing along.“

It feels as if she would continue like this: „but in the end you’ll see, it was right.“ But I didn’t hear anything like that, I was already too far away but still… this moment seemed like the universe was telling me something. Something I already knew but was struggeling to remember in the everyday chaos of life: „You will se in the end, that you made the right choices!“