Here I Go Again

I guess it's just so hard to write about.

My emotions are zig-zagging from excited to sad, and everything seems to take on a heightened sense of importance and meaning. Every time one of the kids raises their arms for me to hold them, or a friend and I meet for drinks at 'our' bar, or I hug someone I love close, I feel that...stomach drop.

You know the feeling--that dip when you experience something that fills you with emotion. You watch the one you love leaving you, you're about to give a speech, or you watch someone you love get married.

Last Saturday, my sister and I took my nephew to the park. He is a whirlwind of a boy, and has more energy than I can imagine even for a two-year-old. He ran from one thing on the playground to another for about a half an hour, and then he just felt like taking a sit-down right there in the grass and looking at the trees for awhile. My sister and I got on either side of him, and we all held hands & looked at the trees together. It was almost-warm & almost-cool and I watched the colored leaves dance in the wind and felt such content.

My sister asked if I was excited to move, and I mentioned that it'll be a big adjustment to be without my family again. To not have the "daily" life with all of them, and to realize that sometimes I'll be alone and not want to be. I wasn't sad, or outwardly saying anything that would show that I was upset. However, my nephew got up unprompted, came over to me and buried himself in my arms.

He laid his eyes on my shoulder and patted my back. I closed my mine.

Stomach: drop.



My three-year-old niece tonight said "I loooooooove Morgan!" (Morgan, her friend at school.) My two-year-old niece pointed at me and said "Me love YOU".

Stomach: drop.



My friend teared up at the bar the other night and grabbed my hand for a second before clearing her throat, moving briskly on other conversation. My granny just said "Why?" with this devastated look on her face today when I said I was moving. My cousin said I'd miss the baby being born.

I feel so guilty. I feel excited, and I feel so incredibly scared. I'll be on my own again--truly on my own--for the first time in so long. On the way home in the car tonight, I saw a shooting star and I whispered "Please, please make this be worth something" as my wish.

This is a good thing--these are exciting things about to happen. But how I'll miss my co-pilots in this adventure.







Here I go again:



Stomach: drop.

Tomorrow...

Turned into today. I accepted the job in DC today, so it's back I go, after 4 years here in Kentucky.

Details to follow...

And I wonder as I wander...

Every day feels like the last day before something happens.

I keep thinking--maybe tomorrow, I'll hear for sure. Maybe tomorrow I will be able to set into motion my plans for the future.

Maybe tomorrow will be the first day of the rest of my life.

I tried to communicate all this crazyness to my doctor on Monday, and I walked out with a prescription for some anxiety meds that will hopefully help. I felt really strange going into the doctor to ask for medicine to help me cope with what is honestly, a GREAT problem to be having. I feel so ungrateful sometimes, as I watch unemployment numbers rise and I sit and fret and brood over which opportunity to take next.

But, it's not about not being grateful for the things that are there. I am constantly thinking of how lucky I am, and continuously grateful that I have opportunities at all. I know how fleeting it all can be, too, which is why I also feel such urgency to take whatever opportunity presents itself in a sure way first.

Which will hopefully be....tomorrow.

I keep looking at pictures tonight, old ones, mostly of when I studied abroad in Denmark. I look at that 21 year old girl, with the short blond hair and silver glasses, and I miss her. God, how I miss that girl who was SO confident of herself that she got on a plane with complete strangers to spend a summer across the ocean. I miss that girl with the chunky silver necklace, baggy gray pants and I always wore that blue jacket. With the hood--it was always raining.

I am thinking of the nights I wrote in my green notebook for hours on the streetcorners of Copenhagen. And how funny it is that 7 years later, I write now to all of you, as I wait for the morning. And wait for the rest of my life, carrying that 21 year old within me, always.

Was that the best I'll ever be?

The 3 Hardest Things About Leaving

Grace and beauty, on a Sunday.

On a Jet Plane

I'm sitting in Charlotte airport, waiting for my plane to leave for DC this morning. I've been up since 4, and will be up for many more hours before I'm back home tonight on this whirlwind of a day. Still interviewing, still wondering, still waiting.

Closure will come soon, as I believe this is the very last round. I will be glad for that. I come back home tonight, arriving by midnight. With miles to go before I sleep, I'm sitting here trying to make the caffeine start working.

My days seem to be passing with a combination of slow but urgent. I need downtime, I need time to be still -but I can't find it. I can't seem to let my mind and body rest, and I'm feeling a need to cram in as much time as possible with everyone. Everything takes on a feeling of "while I can" urgency and so I wake up earlier and go to bed later so I can try to fit it all in. This especially includes my nieces and nephews!

And lest it seem like I'm complaining, here's a picture of sweetness on Saturday night trick or treat :)



My life is busy and blurred --but I wouldn't have it any other way.

Austin

"And, P.S., if this is Austin...I still love you."

I just returned from five days in Austin, working our annual conference, and I'm still recovering from working about 90 hours in just a few short days (that included a 6am Saturday morning flight!). This was a difficult trip for me, as my current opportunities began to intersect with my job, and I found out that a few people know what I'm dealing with right now. My industry is a small, small world, and it was a delicate balancing act that I had to perform this weekend. Dancing around industry politics, keeping certain things quiet (and my co-workers shielded from potential news of my departure) was ....challenging, to say the least.

I got home late last night and crashed into bed, and work came all too early this morning.

So I'm walking around with tired eyes and a little bit distant with everyone I think. I feel like I've missed a hundred news stories, a dozen blog entries, and am still catching up with email. After all this traveling, conference food and stress, I think I've gained back a few of those lost pounds. I'm going to try to run in the morning, since I (blessedly) took the day off.

So that's it, for my world. That quote up there is from a country song, an older one, and it's been running through my head for a few days.

Mostly because I think I am falling out of love.

I had a rougher day with it today, being back in my familiar environment, but part of me just doesn't care anymore. All this distance between us (this, and all the other travels of late) is showing me that time and distance really IS going to make this go away. I will not feel like this forever, although it seems impossible now. Falling out of love, with a tiny new crush, and it feels so sweet. Frightening and unbelievable...but GOOD.

My traveling is almost over (one more trip next week), and my decision needs to be made. I will soon begin putting things in boxes, and thinking about what's next. I made a doctor's appointment --for me, that is HUGE-- to perhaps get on an anxiety medicine. The stress of making all these decisions, having a constant struggle in my head and knowing that my life is going to change very soon, but I don't know where, how, or when--this is difficult for me and the stress is starting to show. Probably not to others, but I can tell.

Our weeks at conference are always stressful, with the constant fires to put out and the togetherness that makes us all lash out. But, I noticed that when I was dealing with added stressors on top of my already-in-place stressors, I felt like I was perpetually dangling on the verge of a panic attack if ONE MORE thing had happened. I would step back from the situation, re-group, grab my coping mechanism of choice at the time, whether that was a friend or a glass of wine.

I am able to calm myself. My sister is not able to do this, and tells me this is a critical thing in determining my "not-craziness" ;) But, each time I have to do that, it makes me just a little bit more anxious that next time, I may not. So, I'm going to do something about it.

And I will do my best to get back into my routines, and maybe I'll run an extra mile tomorrow.

Why not?

I feel like I run ten extra miles every day, just to stay in the race.

The Fall Came Quickly

I think, five minutes ago, I was hot outside. Just one month ago, I lifted my niece up during her second birthday party and she laid her head on my shoulder and I buried a hand into her sweaty curls at the nape of her neck. It lasted about thirty seconds, but I closed my eyes to save it forever.

Then Saturday, I found myself in Portland, Maine, buying not one, but TWO winter coats. Back in Kentucky, I pulled on gloves this morning as I trudged out to my car to scrape the back windshield. Later this afternoon, I did my run with my jacket on.

This is not to say I am sad about the fall--it is my favorite season, hands down. Cool air makes me feel alive, the leaves with the color reminds me that everything changes. It reminds me that I can change, and that new beginnings are possible and that even when it's over, fall will come back around again.

It's very much my way to picture the end before the beginning, and knowing that seasons always come back around makes the start of each one comforting to me on a very deep level.

I am in the midst of major decisions. I have job offers, the beginnings of offers, the "discussions" that could lead to my life taking different and new directions. This weekend I walked down this street of Portland:



I was with my family. My uncle (Dad's brother), his wife, his two sons (my cousins) and their two wives and one new baby. My cousins have watched over me from the very beginning and have been big brothers in every sense of the word except for being physically with me throughout much of my life. They have lived in several places throughout New England, and while it wasn't THAT far--it might as well have been the end of the earth from our old Kentucky home.

After my parents divorced, we never went back to visit. My cousins' parents divorced also, and our lives began to take wildly different paths. Somehow, we managed to stay connected, and I sat at a table in the basement of a dusty bar on Saturday afternoon with 8 people who shared my last name. We had the same bright blue eyes. As someone who has spent much of my life trying to blend in with stepfamilies and absorb myself into a family life that isn't truly my own, this was a relief.

I have a chance to live there. I have the chance to make this life my own, and to strike out and move somewhere entirely different and without a single friend.

But I'll have them. And I'll have him, who won't hesitate to put me on his shoulders again.



Todd and I are grown up now, and as we clutched beers and talked about forever in a bar on Saturday night, I felt a sense of security that I hadn't in awhile. He picked me up at the airport, picked up my bags, and I had a feeling he also wanted to put me back on his shoulders and protect me from the world.

As overwhelming as this entire process is, I am trying to always take a step back and relish in the fact that in so many places across this country, I am loved. I have people willing to open their homes to me, to offer me their money, their friends, their way of life to be mine.

I am a lucky person.

And when the panic that comes with so many life changes coming so soon catches up to me, and I find myself in my car taking deep breathes with a forehead pressed against my steering wheel, I tell myself this over and over.

I put my gloves on, crunch through the leaves and think about how the Fall came quickly, but I will always get up.