Thoughts Before Leaving

I apologize in advance for a relatively disjointed post, but I suppose I am leaving for London. Would you really expect anything else?

This is what the morning of departure looks like: apprehensive, with just a hint of the crazy eyes. 

The main thought as I begin the final few days before leaving for London is that I'm not sure they've arrived yet. The thoughts, I mean. I'm supposed to be having thoughts of the London variety, but actually I hardly ever think about London at all.

Or maybe that isn't necessarily true.

Maybe I do think about it, but not in the way that I used to. The phase of speculating about how my life will be seems to be over, as does the phase of idealizing the way things will be. I'm done imagining scenarios in which I get off the plane and first person I meet ends up being my future best friend or something. I no longer fantasize about meeting my favorite British celebrities. I also now understand that my academic life won't actually consist of a movie-esque "studying" montage, ending with me receiving an award for Year's Most Brilliant Master's Thesis. No, these thoughts don't really turn up much anymore.

Now when I think about London, it takes the form of thoughts like: what bank should I choose? Are these shoes actually worth packing? Can I afford this? (No.) Do I have any idea how to get to my flat? (Again, no.) Is this a good idea? (I certainly hope so.)

Another common thought: I would like to be a college freshman again. Then I remind myself that - apart from being older and having better hair and immediate plans to move to another country - I'm in essentially the same position as I was four years ago. I'm starting over, just as I was then, and everything that now brings forth these feeling of nostalgia was, at that point, a total unknown. All the people I was about to meet, all the things I was about to do - I couldn't even conceive of them as we drove the hour and a half from my hometown to Ann Arbor, and I cried the whole time.

So far I haven't cried once about the impending London trip, and I'm not even feeling particularly nervous. If there's going to be fear, it generally sets in late at night and is always accompanied by these images of me wandering lost around London with more luggage than I can handle. Then I force myself to think about something else.

UPDATE (on the morning of departure): Well, I cried, but then I got through the part where I had to say goodbye to my family and remembered that I still have a working knowledge of how to be a self-sufficient grown-up. I mean, sort of. There is still a 50/50 chance that I will have a breakdown at the airport (sadly, this had happened before). Possible breakdown aside, I think I'm fine.

There's a long day of waiting ahead of me, followed by a long night of flying, followed by London.

I'm pretty sure this is a good idea.

What Do I Have To Offer?

A metaphor, perhaps? I don't know. But I like the picture.

When I was in high school, if there was something you could read about in a book, there was probably a time when I considered it my thing. You know, my thing: my calling in life, my passion, my fate. I pictured myself as a doctor, a medical researcher, a novelist, a journalist, (for a couple of hours one afternoon) a poet, a professor of literature, a political activist, and, from the vantage point of a high school senior, all of these futures appeared equally possible.

Then I started college, and I stopped believing in fate. Just because I memorized all the paths of blood flow in the human heart and my best friend once said she could see me being a surgeon, I wasn't necessarily meant to cut people open and fix broken things inside of them. Likewise, just because I was reading Dickens and the Brontë sisters and Dumas at 14, my future didn't necessarily lie in dissecting these texts and passing judgement on what the writers were trying to say. I can't pinpoint the moment it came to me, but sometime during my freshman year of college, I realized that I could do whatever I wanted; I could change the way things work out just by changing my mind. It was liberating, and it was disorienting. For the first time in my life, I couldn't picture my entire future stretched out in front of me because I knew, in all likelihood, I would spend the rest of my life changing my mind, always searching for some better option than the one that currently holds my attention.

Had I majored in biology or creative writing (neither of which I actually majored in, both of which I very seriously considered), I probably would still have reached my current impasse. I would still be debating whether it's possible to do something that's romantic and creative and idealistic while working toward practical solutions of at least one of the world's problems and making at least enough money to survive. My instincts say that there's no real reason for this to be impossible, but, like everything worth doing, it'll take a fair amount of planning and a fair amount of luck, not to mention a bit of spontaneity. I may have to take jobs that don't come with the perk of a guaranteed successful career trajectory. Someday I may take a job at a nonprofit that doesn't necessarily work in a field of personal interest, but this type of work would nonetheless give me a sense of what it actually means to work for a nonprofit organization. I may live in quite a few cities before I find one that's a good fit.

I have to start seeing every experience as valuable. I have to stop believing that there will be a point in life where I make one decision that cements the future conditions and circumstances of my life. Maybe the real world isn't the all-or-nothing, black-and-white place I once assumed it to be. Maybe there's room for mistakes and changing your mind. Maybe everything won't always work out according to plan, and when it doesn't, I'll have to learn to make the most of what opportunities are available. I think it's a lesson worth learning.

Move On Already!

My bed was like a taco in the sense that I was sleeping on nothing but a brown sheet folded in half like a taco shell. The problem with the taco was that, unlike actual tacos, it wasn't warm inside. Too much air conditioning. My body, I suppose was of normal temperature, but try as I might to radiate heat, I couldn't warm that sheet up. I missed my duvet like you wouldn't believe. Any bit of heat I managed to squeeze out my duvet would capture and hold prisoner for the rest of the night. It was a clever one, that duvet, but now I've relegated it to a shelf in my closet in my parents' house.

My Ann Arbor bedroom used to be a warm and welcoming place. Now it's the blank-walled, bare-bedded, empty-closeted shell of its former self. The rest of the apartment has likewise suffered from the lack of my ridiculous amounts of stuff. It is no longer the place of freshly baked scones...

And comically-named bottles of wine...

And walls covered with possibly too many pictures. 

No, it's not my apartment anymore. It's okay. Really. I haven't (yet) had even one emotional breakdown about this development. I just have to keep telling myself that I don't have to spend the rest of my life in this post-graduation, pre-grad school limbo.

In its infinite wisdom, my sister's college guide magazine says, "life changes. keep up with it." But what about those times when life keeps promising to change but then decides to take forever to get around to it? What about those times when life says, "Sure, you get to go to grad school in London, but you can only earn this privilege by spending four months in purgatory. If you don't lose your mind, you'll have the chance to do something cool. But, knowing you, you'll probably lose your mind."? What about those times?

What about the times when you hang out with your friends and realize that you really may not see some of them ever again?

What about the times when you don't even care that your bathroom counter is covered with makeup residue and hair and wet dust (seriously, gross) because it's not really your bathroom anymore?

What are you supposed to do when in all of your dreams you're on planes and trains, and when you pick up your phone to call your family or a friend, it shatters into tiny pieces?

What about those times?

What are we supposed to do?

My advice: don't emulate me and get all angsty. Teenage-esque angst is never the answer - at least not at the age of 22. But what if I've reverted to the age of 14 in terms of maturity? Because there's a distinct possibility that this has happened, probably because I moved back home after college. I think I need to work on re-growing up.