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It Took Me 40 Years to Keep the Promise I Made at 16
I vowed to myself I’d live a life of adventure. A tragedy derailed that dream for decades
A youthful vow made while studying in Spain remained in the pages of a journal until fulfilled decades later.
Raven Jiang
The promise was made in 1986, in Málaga, Spain.
I was 16 when my Spanish teacher handed me a brochure for a monthlong Spanish immersion program in the Costa del Sol. Somehow, miraculously, my overprotective Puerto Rican mother agreed to send me, but with conditions. I’d have to earn my own spending money. So I worked three jobs that summer and, in early August, showed up at the airport, ready to fly solo to Europe for the first time.
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I moved into a homestay with students from France, Japan and Germany. We were all there to learn Spanish, but we were also, without knowing it, showing each other that the world was enormous and worth our desire to experience it.
I had four hours of language instruction every day — but after that, the city was mine.
I promptly learned the bus route to Centro Histórico. I ate tapas standing up like a local. I walked the streets in my white canvas Tretorns, marveling at the idea that Picasso had lived here and feeling like the coolest girl in Málaga.
For the first time in my life, I felt free. I didn’t quite understand what was happening to me; I just knew I wanted more of it. And somewhere in all that freedom, I made a promise to myself: I will see the world; I will be adventurous. No matter what life tries to take from me, I will keep saying yes to wonder.
Sixteen-year-old me had no idea what keeping that promise would actually cost.
Three months after I returned home, my brother David was killed by a drunk driver. He was 19. My father had passed three years before, and by then I was familiar with the way grief expands to fill every available space, leaving nothing as fragile as wonder anywhere to grow. What was left over was just not enough to nurture the frivolous promise of a 16-year-old girl.
The version of me who felt limitless on the beaches of Málaga, who stood on the deck of a ship watching the Rock of Gibraltar appear through the fog, didn’t disappear completely, but she did stop believing that the life she’d imagined was meant for her.
And so I chose to be useful instead.
Before she’d go to work, my mother would leave me handwritten notes with recipes on the counter, all necessary ingredients in the fridge. I remember the first time the directions said to reach into the cavity of a raw chicken and pull out the bag of gizzards inside. I gagged and did it anyway, because I thought that’s what holding it together looked like.
Still a senior in high school, I’d already mentally canceled my college semester abroad. Nobody asked me to; I just knew that being useful meant staying close to home.
I stopped letting my mind wander back to those Málaga streets, back to what that freedom and wonder felt like. I tucked the promise away in a journal in the back of my sock drawer and never opened it again.
Thirty years passed. I built a life, got married and had two daughters. The older they get, the clearer it becomes that the most dangerous thing I could ever pass down to them is resignation. So I refused to let that sock drawer be the end of my story.
Denise Soler Cox is now an award-winning filmmaker, keynote speaker and author.
Andrea Flanagan
What I learned in Lisbon
The sidewalks of Lisbon look like tile, but they’re not. They’re hand-cut limestone and basalt cobblestones, laid piece by piece — each one irregular, each one necessary — into mosaic patterns that have outlasted empires.
We were going nowhere in particular. We were tourists walking off breakfast, the Atlantic already taking my breath away to the left, a wash of silver and blue so wide and still, it slowed my pace every time I looked at it.
My heel caught a wet spot and I felt the disorienting slide, the half-second where you know you’re either going to catch yourself or go down hard. I reached for my husband’s arm, hooking mine through his, his elbow already bent for me, like he knew. My body found its footing as I leaned into him.
The city suddenly came into sharp focus. The distinct sound of European cars zinging past, the audible flap of birds as they took flight in the park beside us, Portuguese café music pumping from open doors, the smell of bacon drifting from somewhere nearby. Every sense firing at once, that unmistakable feeling of being fully present.
And then that all too familiar thought swooshed in: Someone like me doesn’t get to have this.
In Lisbon earlier that week, my daughters and I had signed up to take a mosaic-making class together. Three hours of arranging broken pieces of vibrantly colored tile into something beautiful. My daughters were roughly the same age I was when I made the promise.
Holding my husband’s arm on that sidewalk, I finally understood what I’d been gradually doing for years: taking my broken pieces and arranging them until they made something worth keeping.
So when that old mantra arose this time, that I didn’t deserve a life like this, I didn’t stop. At last feeling whole and present, I pulled my husband forward and kept walking.
Ahead of us, our daughters were lost in conversation, laughing, pausing at store windows. I watched them just existing like that and felt simple joy.
This July, I was the keynote speaker at a conference in Lima, Peru, for 3,000 people, and I brought my family, including my eldest, who heads to college in the fall. The girl who worked three summer jobs to get to Spain took her daughters to Peru, so they don’t have to wait 40 years to keep a promise made at 16, to know the world belongs to them, too.
AARP essays share a point of view in the author’s voice, drawn from expertise or experience, and do not necessarily reflect the views of AARP.
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