... so it may seem like this blog is a little premature. But I've been stuck in a maddening sort of pre-departure holding pattern for a week and a half now, with nothing to do but twiddle my thumbs and obsess over what may or may not have gone wrong/be going wrong /go wrong in the future, and I've decided the only way to reclaim some peace of mind is to stop sulking and start acting like someone who is going to Germany for a year. And what do people who are going to Germany (or anywhere for that matter), and who are my age, do? Why, blog of course!
The waiting is, by far, the worst part. I've been doing my level best to distract myself: with trips to the gym, with flexing my newly found cooking muscles for my family, with HBO-GO and iTunes and the Food Network and NPR. But mostly I skulk around my house in my comfy pants, assembling a mental catalog of all the potential catastrophes that may interfere with my travel plans or, worse, with my grant as a whole-- an important email overlooked, a crucial form gone AWOL, etc. (**BREAKING NEWS** Even as I write this, my mother comes into my room with a package containing the student ID card I need to board my flight and neglected to order until the last possible moment. Phew) Also, I waste excessive amounts of time on Facebook, jealously stalking those friends who have already embarked on the first stage of their post-graduation life, whatever that stage looks like for them; or, worse still, the friends who are, this very day, returning to the reassuring shelter of the tiny liberal arts college on the hill that, with all due pomp and circumstance and a couple of speeches of varying usefulness, kicked me to the curb in May with a piece of paper that supposedly attests to my readiness for what lies ahead. One positive to come from all of this Facebook stalking: it has forced me to come to terms with the hard truth that I had been conveniently ignoring all summer: I am no longer an undergraduate. Ready or not (I mean me) here I come.
Again, I try to distract myself from all of this-- from feeling thoroughly unprepared for real life; from being paralyzed with the fear and uncertainty of moving to a 1.) large city in a 2.) foreign country, both of which are new to me (I didn't go abroad as an undergrad, even though I was a language major, because funds and fortitude were lacking); from mourning the relationship I had no choice but to give up in order to embark on this grand adventure. Mostly, though, my brain feels much like those wild cats in the Cat House down at the Cincinnati Zoo look: when it's not sleeping, which most of the time it is, it's pacing back and forth endlessly along the plate glass that separates it from the rest of the world, able to see what's on the other side but utterly flummoxed as to how to get to it.
Once the ball gets rolling, of course-- once I'm in Germany, once I'm finally doing instead of waiting to do-- most of my current anxieties and neuroses will disappear or, more accurately, be replaced by new ones. Right now I'd welcome those new, more kinetic worries: starting work, finding a place to live, meeting new people, navigating a new city/country/language/culture. These are worries that come with concrete nouns and active verbs attached-- a sense, again, of doing, and of moving forward as opposed to idling. Right now, though, I can't really do much, just watch the very dramatic and decisive life change headed my way come closer and closer. I can't reach out and touch it yet; it's on the other side of that glass which, granted, will disappear soon-- sooner, perhaps, than I'd like it to. Once the safety glass is gone, though, will I have the courage to step out of my accustomed habitat into a larger world that I have, until now, watched only from a comfortable and protected distance? (This is where the cat analogy breaks down: in the case of the animal, the glass is more for the protection of what's outside the glass than what's inside.)
That, I suppose, remains to be seen.
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