Sofia

My relationship with APU is so weird. I'm glad I don't go there anymore, glad to be away from certain environments and certain attitudes. But I miss it enough that it's a physical ache when I see pictures from my time there, or go on Google and virtually "walk" down the street. The formation of my adult consciousness developed there, with people who are truly unlike anyone else I've known so far in my life. And that's not to say that people like that aren't here, or anywhere really, just that the ones in that particular place and time impacted me. I am the result of those relationships. And people aside, I miss the sun. It's hard to be sad (for me) when it's 80 degrees out and beautiful, if smoggy.


I think my relationship with Puyallup/Lakewood/Seattle is similar. I didn't transform here, but this is where I developed my foundations. And as I prepare myself in the next 6 or 7 months to possibly leave again, this time for Bulgaria, I'm recognizing the wonted sensation of longing for what you also can't stand. I'll miss driving 512 in the morning and seeing the sunrise behind Mt. Rainier, miss my work, miss my AVID kids more than almost anything, miss friends like Rachel, Jenna, Brennan, Ankit, miss my room with the red and gold striped walls I labored over myself, miss my dog; I'll miss the comforts of having all these familiar things so close and accessible. I'll long for what I can't stand. Not that I can't stand any of these things or people; my point is the monotony of life and the negative aspects of anything are desirable to escape, especially if they're close in time and proximity to one another.


I like going places and experiencing everything that makes them an "other" to me. But the result is leaving so many bits of my emotion and love in all of them, in everyone. So it's awesome, but it hurts a hell of a lot sometimes too. And teaching in Sofia won't be any different.

Room for Heavier Things

I am twenty-one years old and rather estranged from the version of myself I envisioned as a blooming adolescent. In my eyes, a twenty-one year old was self-sufficient, mature, had a stable if flexible understanding of their identity, was educated, on the cusp of their assuredly successful career, and overall was exactly who they wanted to be. They were twenty-one after all, liberated by graduation and their eighteenth birthday to create themselves outside the confines of the public education system and the parental intolerance that had caged their youth. If I take the memory of being small and very young, and apply that perspective to my present age, my expectations for those in their second decade is the same as it's always been.

But if I look around me, I see much more variety: those barely in school, those who work 40 hours (more often, the 38 hours prescribed by penny-pinching employers looking to skirt giving benefits) and kind of go to community college sometimes, living with their parents, living with a roommate, living occasionally in one place, and on it goes. It's possible of course that my generation is the most indecisive of peoples to have breathed our sweet polluted air, but it's hard not to consider my own circumstances. You know, the ones I've chosen.

I live with my parents.
I don't have a car.
My average work week is less than 20 hours. Far less.
I go to community college full time.
I have a 3.something GPA.
I don't know my major anymore, and I don't know when or where I will transfer to a real university.
I have close friends and a boyfriend of 5 months, but how many people am I really intimate with? Fully intimate? Not in the usual sexual sense, but in the sense that I am not revealing aspects of myself, facets that match who I am with, but the full 3-dimensional effect? 4-dimensional if I'm like that with you over a period of time (the fourth dimension is time, you know).

Everybody is just a stranger but that's the danger in going my own way.
Am I living it right?

It's hard to know when you're tangled up in the weeds, feeling insubstantial and in the midst of being suffocated by different expectations, requirements, and the general things of life that drain your soul slowly through a bed of fresh razors. The question continually surfaces, adding a peripheral context of doubt, of if the next stage will be better in any way. Some days it is overwhelming, but hope appears, knowing that it will get all done eventually. Small steps, they say. It swells from within, and I know that whatever is inside can't be kept in the small frame of my illusionary limits, not for much longer.
Someday I'll be so damn much more.
'Cause I'm bigger than my body gives me credit for.

And I think this is true of every person who aspires to find themselves before losing themselves. (That sequence is quite vital to achieve the desired results of identity, you know)