Sitting in Dallas-Fort Worth airport, Frank Sinatra is singing over the speakers a jazzy ballad, proclaiming “There will never be another you!” And after the week I’ve had, I can’t help but glance up at the speakers and grin.

“Oh Frank,” I murmur in the early morning quiet of the not-yet-too-busy airport. “If only you knew.”

To say spring break has been remarkable would be an understatement. Every year, hundreds of thousands of college students across the country look forward to this week as a chance to unwind, a chance to turn up, a chance to escape reality for a while before the pressures of finals and adulthood and real life catch up to us once again.

I can honestly say that this week, I was able to do all of those things (maybe not turn up all that much) thanks to my wonderful parents and a city that I’ve always wanted to visit but never had the chance to –– New Orleans, Louisiana.

Last Sunday, my parents and I were sitting on our back patio, listening to country and grilling ribs, when we started daydreaming about getting away for the week. We talked about San Antonio, we talked about San Marcos, and then out of left field, my Mom said, “Well Haylee, you’ve always wanted to go to New Orleans, right?” And so hatched our crazy idea to call a hotel on the Mississippi river, book a room and drive eight hours to New Orleans without any forethought or planning.

Sounds crazy, right?

It was exactly what needed to happen.

You see, sometimes, I think we lose ourselves. We don’t mean to. It just happens in the day-to-day craziness that is life. We get so caught up in our role, trying to be the person that our friends, our bosses, our significant others, our professors think that we need to be, that we forget who we want to be.

This week, I got to be the person I wanted to be.

We packed up and drove across the Louisiana border, finding out about thirty minutes after we crossed it that I-10 would shut down for a week thanks to flooding, effectively blocking our easiest route back into Texas. That was a fun surprise. It was the first of many fun surprises this week that required a choice: do we freak out, or do we improvise? Do we make a plan, or do we make some memories?

We went with the memories, and it was the best choice we could have made.

More than anything, I want to travel. I want to have adventures. I’m sharing my soul with y’all here, but more than anything in the world, I want my freedom. The chance to do what I want to do, when I want to do it, how I want to do it. I think from a young age, that’s what I've wanted.

Think for a moment, if you will, about what you wanted when you were little, when you were a child. What was your dream? The thing you wanted with all your heart? If there was nothing standing in your way, if you could do absolutely anything, be anyone, and it didn’t matter what anyone said was possible or practical or prudent- what was your dream?

I wanted to be a movie star.

Go ahead, laugh if you want. With me, not at me, right? But that was it, I wanted to be an actress in a great movie, a heroine who beat the bad guy and rode off into the sunset, hopefully with Prince Charming in tow, but that wasn’t necessary. I wanted to be the hero, the one that saved the day. I wanted the freedom that I thought came with it- the ability to go anywhere at a moment’s notice, to explore and see everything, just because I wanted to.

Fast forward a few years, and I still wanted all that. Not necessarily as a movie star anymore- at that point, I decided I wanted to be a pirate. Freedom and adventure still promised, hours of hair and makeup not required.

I think it’s funny how we know ourselves better as children than we do as adults.

However, I didn’t become a pirate (or a movie star, but that’s a whole different story). I grew up, went to high school, got all A’s and did all the extra curricular activities that I could fit in a 24-hour period. I graduated and got into a great school, and started working on a degree in journalism. In my mind, that was the closest I could realistically get to freedom while still having a real, adult job. I started making plans for a future- where I would live, what job I would have, when I would get married, all the things that the world tells us we should know by the time we’re 20 years old.

Somewhere in all the responsibility, the little girl in the sparkly dress with the crown and pirate sword slowly got pushed into the shadows, her little blue eyes watching something she couldn’t stop. Somewhere along the way, I lost sight of that little girl and what she wanted more than anything else.

In the middle of life, I lost sight of me.

About a week before Spring Break, my roommate made me watch Pirates of the Caribbean with her. Suddenly, I felt like a little kid again, dazzled by the pirates sword-fighting on the bright blue Caribbean waters, the sun glinting off the waves. I was blown away by the rush of emotion that filled me, that took my breath away and made me long, once again, for that old forgotten dream of running away and finding adventure. It’s hard to do that when you’re surrounded by responsibilities and obligations and relationships and things that take so much of you that you’ve hardly anything left to give yourself.

I couldn’t shake the feeling that it wasn’t just a random Sunday afternoon stroke of boredom that made Aly ask me to watch Pirates with her- whether you believe in it or not, I think that God speaks to us all in different ways, gets our attention with things He knows will call to us personally. Who am I to question whether or not He used Jack Sparrow to do it?

A week later, I was on my home to Corpus, and I still couldn’t get the idea, the hunger for freedom, out of my head. I thought I was going to just spend another week at home, hanging out and seeing the people I hadn’t seen in months, making dinner, taking care of my dog, the usual.

But when I got home and told my mother about all the thoughts bouncing in my head, she was quick to offer a suggestion- why don’t we just go away? Have an adventure, do something grand and different, get away from responsibilities and just have fun?

And that’s how we ended up in New Orleans, Louisiana, with a map of the French Quarter and no idea what we were going to do first, but gosh darn it, we were going to do something.

I could not have handpicked two better people to be my parents. It was a winding path for us to find each other, and maybe I’ll tell y’all about it sometime, but I can’t think of anyone else who would just take a week off of work and whisk their daughter away because they could see she needed it. I am constantly overwhelmed by the blessing they are.

So how does this random venture into madness tie in to me finding the little girl in the shadows again?

I gave myself back to her, slowly. I made a decision last Sunday that was hard, that was difficult and painful and private, but one that I knew had to be made, so that I could start to be my own person again. The very next day, I jumped head first into an adventure that I’d wanted to take my entire life, but had never had the chance to.

Sometimes, y’all, you just gotta do it.

You have to push through the hard and the hurt so that you can get to the place you need to be. And it’s gonna suck sometimes. You’re not going to be sure you made the right choice or did it the right way, but in those moments, you have to remember the child watching your every move. You have to think about the kid you were, the one you used to be, the one that had dreams and desires and hopes for their future, the one that dreams about being you one day, and then you make them proud. You owe it to them, to give them that chance at their dreams. You owe it to yourself to be the person that you’ve always wanted to be. To do the things you’ve always wanted to do, be it go on adventures, or perform on a stage, or go to college a million miles away from home. One day, you aren’t going to have the chance to chase your dreams, and if you didn’t do everything you could to make them happen, I promise you, you’re going to regret it.

We visited a cemetery in New Orleans. In Louisiana, the water table below the ground is so close to the surface they have no choice but to bury their dead above ground. Sounds creepy, but the tombs make for some incredibly interesting cemeteries. They’re all different shapes and sizes, some tall and imposing, others small and simple, but all serve the same purpose- they house the bodies of those who have died for a short period of time, about a year, and then the bones are pushed to the back of the tomb and fall down into a little hole, where the stay until they turn into dust, and then the tombs are reused. That’s the best way I can explain it without going into too much detail that I’m sure most of you don’t want to hear.

Seeing those tombs and hearing what happens to the bodies after the person dies gave me some perspective. Not just in realizing that death really is the great equalizer, but also that in just a few short years (retrospectively, in the span of eternity), I’m going to be just like those bodies in the tombs. And so that time I have between here and there is incredibly short and incredibly precious. If I get to the end of my life and look back and see that I let the time I was given slip away, well… There won’t really be anything I can do about it, and maybe that’s the scariest thought of all.

I feel as though I should mention that we did get back across the Texas-Louisiana border. We just had to make it more of a round trip, up through Shreveport, overall a fourteen-hour drive as opposed to eight hours.

When we got in the car after our grand, week long adventure, and stared at the open road in front of us, knowing that it was going to be a long day, it was a daunting prospect. I don’t want to get all preachy here, guys, but looking back now I can see the lesson in it. Life is going to throw curve balls, and sometimes the only way to handle them is to take the long, difficult road around them. We couldn’t just stay in NOLA- oh, how I wish we could. We had to get back to real life and take care of what needed to get done. We couldn’t take the easy road back- literally, it was under water. Our only option was to make the hard trip home, navigating the map the best way we knew how, and, while we were at it, enjoying the scenery along the way.

What a great metaphor I found in that for my current season of life.

I started this article at seven o’clock in the morning, typing in an airport in Dallas, Texas. My first flight left Corpus earlier, at five a.m. I can’t make some beautiful speech about watching the sun rise over the clouds and how it was a new beginning for me because, frankly, I was too tired to look out any windows, and on top of that, the sun hadn’t risen yet any way.

But I do think this is a new start for me, I hope with all my heart that it is. And I hope somewhere in this rambling speech, you find something that inspires you, or at least challenges you.

Don’t be complacent with your life.

If there is anything that deserves your attention, that deserves your action and your drive and your heart and soul, it’s you. It’s who you are, and it’s who God made you to be.

Don’t be afraid to be a little selfish with that.

Like Frank Sinatra was saying, there will never be another you. He’s right. You won’t ever have another chance than the life you have right now. Don’t lose yourself. And if you feel like maybe you already have, like maybe it’s too late, it’s not.

You have no farther to look than to your own heart.