People keep asking me how I’m feeling–am I’m excited? Am I scared? Am I sad? Am I happy to be done with work? etcetera, etcetera

To be honest, I don’t have a great answer for any of those questions:

Am I excited–of course, though after months and months spent in a strange internal state of excitement, anxiety has conquered excitement. For now.

Am I scared–of course, I’ve quit my job. That paycheck I’ve gotten so used to seeing in my bank account will no longer make its friendly weekly visit. My finances, like my ticket to Peru, are now one-way. The cozy routine I’ve followed the last few years has all but disintegrated.

Am I sad–of course. Sadness always comes with leaving those you love. And though I’ll come back, I won’t come back to the life I’ve known these past couple years. This trip represents the conclusion of one chapter of my life, and the start of another. This is a melancholy thing, but also exciting. New chapters are almost always exciting.

Am I happy to be done with work? While it’s a mostly positive feeling, it’s all strangely anticlimactic. I still just feel like I’m taking a couple days off of work, or that I never really had that job in the first place (wrap your head around that one and you’ll get a feel for my current state of mind).

Maybe it’s disbelief? Maybe denial?  I suppose I can’t quite believe this trip is about to happen. Clearly it hasn’t truly “hit me” yet. I wonder when it will. I wonder if it will. Will month 3, month 6, month 9 (??) come around, and I’ll still feel like I’m on a 10-day trip to the twilight zone… like I’ll return to work on Monday … feeling like the whole thing never happened? Like it was some long, comatose dream.

Or, will I get on that plane, and like I often do when I stare out those tiny round windows, come to some profound realization, and it will all just hit me at once– like a 25 pound backpack.

I suppose when the fog clears, readiness remains. I’m feeling about as ready as I’ve ever felt. Maybe even too ready? Like it’s this big deal, that doesn’t quite feel like a big deal at all. Like from a distance, it was this big shadow, but now that the light shines on it, it’s something quite small. Something not at all big or scary.

Or a little similar, I’m sure, to how my brother feels right now–in his first new house, with his first baby on the way.  After the work has been done; lines have been waited in; necessary hoops jumped through; days spent; overwhelming bouts of excitement felt. After all that learning has occurred– those next BIG steps start to feel like they are all just apart of another natural progression. Like it’s all apart of something much bigger than ourselves. Something quite wonderful.

Yeah, it’s all so strange, yet not so strange at all.

where the sadness comes in–me, with just some of my overwhelmingly wonderful family