This is terrifying.
I am terrified.
Out of my mind.
I'm facing my entire future. I have to decide what I want to do, where I want to go and nobody will give me a straight answer when I ask for information or advice. All I hear all the time is "follow your dream/happiness". I'm 17. How the HELL am I supposed to know what my dream is, not to mention how to follow it?! People expect me to start being an adult, but I have no idea how to do that and nobody will tell me. How am I supposed to suddenly know how to be an adult without having ever been one before? How do I face the world and my life when I don't know what it looks like or where it is?
Another scary part of this is that I'm facing a change similar to the one that destroyed me a few years ago. Once again, I'm faced with leaving every comfort and everything I know and love behind and facing an entirely new life. This time, I'll be completely alone, without even my mother to guide me. I'm still not even out of the emotional wreckage of the last big move, and probably never will be, and now I have to move on again.
As ever, I am a mess of contradictions. I'm terrified of change, of moving on, of leaving things behind and of being forgotten. And yet I have one of the greatest escape/running away/avoidance instincts you'll ever encounter. When confronted with difficulty, struggle or emotion, I tend to run the other way like my life depends on it. And in those moments, it does seem like my life, my very being, depends on it. Depends on my ability to prevent damage, to preserve myself and shield myself from the world.
It's ironic that I'm starting to feel that way about my life currently. I'm very emotionally invested here, and there are a lot of things I find myself needing to escape from, to remove myself from. And yet, the way that I can escape requires me to face my future. I'm kind of stuck between two giant walls, and can't go sideways, and I'm panicking.
As much as I want to leave, though, there are some things here that I know I can't live without. I completely depend on certain things here, most significantly my three best friends. I know this for a fact. A little while ago, two of them were gone for a week, and I nearly imploded. I don't know what I would have done if Tee hadn't been there. I got anxious, stressed out and could actually barely function. Losing that support in 8 months is even harder to face than leaving Germany was when I was still there, because now I'm consciously aware of how much I rely on it and what losing it will do to me.
This song goes well with this post because I went to see Windmills in concert recently and when he played this song, I got overwhelmed with exactly the feelings that this post is about. Live music is incredibly powerful.
The illustrations on this post are photos by him and her.
