Discussions with Myself

August 25- Going Home?

         So tonight I start the final stage of packing. Saturday I move. I just told my mother on the phone today that I was ready. Yet why is it that as soon as you think you are sure about something you second guess.

         I had thoughts to put down just 2 or 3 minutes ago but moving to where my computer is put me in a room where the notes of Indigo Girls are more solid, instead of just music in the distance, and I find myself distracted. Oh well, I will do the best I can.

         I hope I don't regret this move. I have yet to regret my decision to leave school since I made it almost 6 months ago. If I know nothing else I know that I had nothing left to give to being a therapist, or a student, or a teacher. That fact is the only thing that keeps me facing forward. Every time I wonder if I am simply running from hard work, or if I am a quitter I go back to where my soul resides and see it laying limply in the darkness, gazing at me with tired eyes and I can't help but see that it doesn't matter even if I am. I can't do it anymore, at least not for awhile. But the move... that is another issue entirely.

         I don't like where I live. My apartment insists on reliving Moses' plagues on a small scale. First it was roaches (which took 3 exterminator visits to control and I STILL find them on occasion), then silverfish, now it is damned drain flies (basically fruit flies that come from the drain). Apartment aside, where I live is considered one of the worst places in the country for allergy and asthma sufferers. All of the pollen and air junk settles here because it is a valley. I won't even get into the stench of the paper plant and the dust. Since I have both asthma and allergies I have had the distinct honor of using this wonderful environment to score one of the records for "most times in the health center for sinus infections and bronchitis in a year." Oh yes, and then there is the water that is so filled with minerals that my kitchen could be used as a limestone quarry. One of the favorite graduate student topics of conversation is about leaving here, for all of these reasons and more.

         One would think that since I AM leaving that I'd be ravingly ecstatic. Everyone I talk to has asked me almost daily where I was going to go since they heard I had decided to leave for a year. At the time there were plans in the works that allowed for me to sound exotic and exciting because Chicago and San Francisco were pretty big possibilities. Now that those options have fallen through, I get to say that I am "going home".

         But am I really? I am headed back to where I was born and raised, where my parents, sisters, and most of my extended family are, but is that home? I left at 18. I have not spent more than 3 months at a time there in almost 8 years. I don't see my family more than a few times a year. If home is where you hang your hat, then home isn't back in Michigan. I miss family, but I am comfortable missing them. Will I be as comfortable when that fades from existance?

         I should have spent last week with everyone here that I may not see again but I can't help but be drawn to the solitude of relative hermitage. Where I am going, time in the quiet of aloneness and in the confines of my own brain will be extremely hard to come by. I have always had a sense that this quiet is something that I need as much as a bad poet needs a cliche but now I wait with trepidation to see if that vague "sense" turns into a full fledged lust for the unattainable once I become part of the ever-bustling fold once again.

         Maybe telling my mother I was ready was really just a momentary lapse of sanity. Maybe it was just an expression of how badly I want to escape, not taking into consideration where I will be escaping to.

         No, on second thought, I am ready. I am ready to gamble on my odds. This won't be a year of family servitude, a transplant back into high school, or the end of any sort of social life with creatures of my own age. It will instead be the first time in my life where I feel relaxed for more than just one day at a time, where my health isn't measured in varying degrees of ill, and where I can feel like me for longer than just stolen moments in a coffee shop or while staring at this yellow screen. I guess I can say that I am certainly "going home", and gladly so, if going home means returning in a few weeks to where my soul resides and seeing the light on.

"Well-behaved women rarely make history"
-Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

         
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