No amount of excitement, dread, anxiety, stress, or restlessness can pull a day closer or push it farther away. 24 hours after 24 hours slides by, and then that certain 24 hours I have been waiting for for ten months arrives. I expected a blare of trumpets announcing its entrance into the world, but it just slipped into time, quiet and bright, like so many days before it. Today is September 24, 2010. A date circled in red on the calendar for almost a year. Today is the day I fly to Birmingham, UK to study abroad for nine months.
How do I feel?
Excited? Terrified? Stressed? Relieved? Confused? Tired? Crazy?
Yes. A smoothie of all that is churning in my stomach.
But, more than anything, I am curious.
What’s going to happen?
What will it be like?
Who will I meet?
What will I do?
Did I pack everything?
And the big question, the question chirping like a nightingale caged in my brain all summer, is who will I be?
Whenever my environment has changed, I have changed. Always for the better. Always coming closer to the person who I want to be.
Remembering 7th grade, I remember a trap. I had unknowingly sewn myself into a puzzle piece in kindergarten. I was 13 now, but I was still caught in that puzzle piece. I had grown; I had changed. The puzzle piece was too small, too tight; the shape was all wrong. But that puzzle piece was how I fit into my friends, my school, my team, my life.
Then in eighth grade like the Hulk, I transformed, growing huge, shredding my puzzle piece with a primal yell. In other words, I transferred. And away from the only place I had known since kindergarten, at this new school, in this new city, with these new people, I became the person who I wanted to be.
Again it is time for me to change, but it is hard to change in an environment that stays the same. Though it felt like I became a new person every month during my two years at BSC, I plateaued towards the end. Maybe it’s because I settled; maybe I got lazy. I never felt trapped, but it is time to leave, and today I am gone, heading towards a country that I will live in for nine months, never having set foot on its soil.
I am flying over the Atlantic right now. Who am I going to meet in the mirror on the other side? Who will I meet in the mirror when I return home?
But, of course, the real question that I am asking that I probably should have answered before I got on this plane is what the hell am I doing?!
I have no idea, but I am so excited to be doing it.
But seriously, Anna Rose, what the hell are you doing?!
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