The last time I shared a post on this blog was June 9th. I've made several attempts to start blog posts but none of them have gone anywhere and they now sit in draft status in my Blogger post list. The topics are various: art, fear, things about summer that annoy me, things about tourist that annoy me, the stress of planning for my three month journey with Semester at Sea...the list is long.
Why have I not been posting? It isn't that I've not been writing. Just this morning I put pen to paper and filled in the last page of a hard copy journal. I could in part pass it off to being busy. I'm at the end of a six week research assistant position that took up far more hours of my time than I originally anticipated and due to the early morning hours it required I've been rather tired these past six weeks. In fact my last post was done the day before the position began.
Mostly though I have simply been turning very inward, which is why my journal has been getting far more attention than my blog. I've been trying to make some decisions about my future or at least establish a trajectory. I've a major, potentially life changing event taking place in less than eight weeks, I'll be leaving my life as it is now for three months and when I return I'll be faced with the last semester of earning my bachelor's degree and graduating in May. After that life is just sort of a gray fog...
I've never done well with uncertainty, yet the next ten months will be full of so much of it. I know all of the tricks I'm supposed to do to help deal with this. I try to pause, to breathe, attempt to bring my thoughts to the present moment rather than worrying about what will happen a week, a month or ten months from now, but even with these tricks and tools the anxiety of uncertainty remains. It doesn't go away, it just sort of becomes a simmer of background noise rather than the headlining act of my thoughts.
Trying to talk to people about this proves to be nearly impossible. I'm often met with, "Oh, I'd not be anxious at all! It's so exciting and you are going to have an amazing experience. I'm so jealous and don't understand why you are so worried...don't be so silly." And while I know that the words are well intended I can't help but feel a bit dismissed, as though there is something wrong with me for feeling anxious. For the record, I am also feeling excitement and I do expect the next ten months to be transformative, but the anxiety is still there.
I do take some comfort in the knowledge that, other than establishing a rough outline of a plan, it would be impossible at this time to be able to be plan the next ten months at all. It simply cannot be done with any sort of firmness and I'd likely explode my brain if I tried to do so.
In the long run I know things will likely turn out okay. That I will have tales of adventure to share, a feeling of great satisfaction when I am handed my degree and that I'll head off into a potentially awesome future. Right now though I need to deal with the next hour, the next five minutes, the next moment of today.
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