I’ve made a huge realization this week: I have spent a solid 15 plus years crafting this dream life- Barbie and Ken Dream house included. Every decision I made was calculated enough to ensure that my delicately sewn together life would stay as such. Strangely, I never put it together that when I ventured off to college, my little bubble back home would in fact, not stay intact. Can you believe the nerve of the people I “left behind” in order to achieve my dreams moved on with their lives once I left? I mean, what’s up with that?!
When I first ventured back to the ole stomping grounds, I could never put a finger on the strange feeling that hung around my heart like a damp cloth. It took me a month to realize that it is the feeling of being out of place. Never in my life did I foresee myself being uncomfortable in the place that once made me feel more myself and more alive than anywhere else ever had.
Throughout high school I was on the executive board of a summer camp called Kids Unlimited. To make a long story very short: the camp was more or less my child, I attended camp this past week and came home and cried because I felt absolutely useless. I also felt pathetic for crying over feeling like I no longer belonged. I am a person that more likely than not will do whatever I can physically do to prevent myself from being vulnerable. It makes me feel weak and I don’t stand for that. Nonetheless, I cried the twenty-minute drive home; I couldn’t even sing to music- which is my favorite daily activity. I never was angry with my new team that has taken the reins, I had just foolishly assumed that I could jump back into my position as if I had never left in the first place.
I have always been a person that easily accepts the idea of change and (for the most part) can actually follow through with the action. But this, this was something I never saw coming. We, referring to a majority of people my age, are in the biggest season of change we will most likely ever experience in our lives. There is one huge catch: the presence of an eerie feeling that nobody prepares you for. When I left for school, I was reminded of all the people that loved me and what great excitement I had in front of me. Nobody told me that the life I had spent so long piecing together would become a faint memory of what it once was. Every time my friends and I return home, we would have the opportunity to glance back at what we once were and had, but only grazing it with our fingertips. Never getting close enough to fully grasp it; constantly performing this balancing act that we had never signed up for in the first place.
Basically, I have come to discover that this “period of change” that I thought only pertained to moving to college, is actually just my reality for the next decade. From the stand point that I don’t have a blueprint for my future, going to the University of Alabama is just about all I have in my “permanent” column for the next four years. With the uncertainty of my future plans comes the absence of any people, places, or things that have found their “forever home” with me. Forgive me for my mental breakdown/come to Jesus moment but my goal with this blog was to be as real as possible; therefore, here I am: skeletons and all.
I’m not really here to give advice or insight on this one, folks. More or less I’m just filling you people in on my inner thoughts and struggles and to talk about the things that nobody likes to. The one thing that I am 100% sure of in this whole mess: myself. I’m not positive that I can trust the decisions I make from here on out now that I have left my Dream house, but I can be sure that I know who I am. Therefore, in the great words of Billy Idol: Well, there's nothing to lose, and there's nothing to prove, well, I'm dancing with myself.
