I'm dizzy.

This has been a really uncomfortable (but amazing) week.  I thought I was completely prepared to come here and deal with the ambiguity of not really knowing where I’d end up after the CELTA, but you can’t ever completely prepare for that, can you?  Whether I meant for them to or not, images formed in my mind about the places I might want to end up, the schools I might want to work in, the people I’d like to be close to.  But because I placed priority on good schools, on my roots, and on what I really wanted, I let go of all of that and branched out.  I stretched my hands out to people and places I wasn’t thinking about last week.  I decided to decide when the time came that I had to.  I haven’t been able to get the butterflies out of my stomach since (and my pants are already getting quite a bit too big for me.  If I keep this up, I’ll be swimming in them by next week).  Despite the discomfort (or maybe even because of it), I’m really feeling a part of the world again.  I’m not just forming images in my head of what my life should be, or will be, or could be.

So because of all of this, I’ve been thinking about two kinds of people: those who reach out, and those who don’t.  I always used to think of myself as one of those who does reach out, but for the last five years or so,  I’ve mostly been among those who don’t. I placed far too much stock in the necessity of seeming like I was strong, or cool, or any of a million other things that I couldn’t possibly have seemed like, walking around swathed in the emotional equivalent of bubble wrap. (And if any of that was cool, I can’t imagine why anyone would want to be cool.)   I’ve known this for quite a while, and I’ve wanted to open myself up, but I’d been stumped about how exactly to go about fixing it.  It just seemed like trying to teach myself to breathe underwater. 

Well, maybe it’s the culture here, maybe it’s got something to do with getting away from home and all the expectations about who I am there, or who I have been,  maybe it’s because I need help from other people here, or maybe it’s just the right time, but now I’ve gone back to reaching, without even really thinking about it.  And because of it, I’m making friends, learning amazing new things from them, and noticing things I never would have seen on my own.  I’m interviewing for jobs in places I never thought I’d live (happily!), having legitimately interesting conversations during these interviews instead of just posing and cringing inside.  I’m opening myself up to the honesty of really, really wanting something. 

I feel like myself again.

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