I don't know how to start this post. I'm not sure what I want to say. I imagine it will turn out as a jumbled mess of thoughts, but I've been trying to write this blog post for a good hour and a half, and I doubt my ability to say anything more eloquent right now.
Things are changing. This is something that I'm both excited and scared for. Within the next year (and possibly in a time as short as the next 6 months), I'll have a job and be living on my own, paying my own way through college. If you had talked to me a month ago, I would have only been excited. Perhaps a little scared, but mostly just excited. But my parents are going to be moving as well, and in doing so, all my ties to the house that I've lived in for literally longer than I can remember will be cut. It's just a house, but it's the house where all my memories center. My childhood happened here, as well as my early adult life. And I won't lie-- I feel pretty dumb for being so shaken by my parents moving. I mean, regardless of if they stay here or not, I'll be living somewhere else, so it doesn't seem like this should be as big of a deal as I'm making out to be. It's not like if they move I lose my memories and childhood. All I lose is a house. Meh.
I miss China. At first, when I went out there, things were really different and it made me pretty nervous/scared/anxious, but it only took a couple months for me to get totally comfortable there, so that gives me hope that moving out and all that jazz will be as awesome as it's made out to be. I've never heard anyone complain about how they just wish they had stayed at home and not gained independence. And if I were to hear someone complain about that, I would surely not want to be their friend haha.
The question I get asked most often upon anyone hearing that I enjoyed my ILP experience-- "Will you go back?" I don't know. Maybe. I would consider it a possibility in my future. But not in the next couple years. I want to finish college first, and them I'm considering my possibilities. I might take somewhere between a semester and a year to go back as a head teacher. There are many countries that ILP visits that I haven't yet been to, and there's many different parts of China that I haven't been in. And it wouldn't get old. My roommates and I always compared our experiences with even the other schools in Zhongshan, and every single one of us had such a different experience. And we were all in the same city, so just imagine all the possibilities.
On the other hand, I might find something else to do with my life. I have a couple different ideas of where I might want to take my life, and I don't want to get too attached to any one of them, because I know that there is some force in the world that, as soon as I settle down and decide upon one path, will laugh in my face and throw me in another direction that I hadn't considered. And then this force will watch me struggling in unpreparedness and say "HAHAHAHAHA NOW WHAT." So I like to be one step ahead of this force by not having a rigid plan and staying on my feet so that I'll be able to take whatever situation I find myself in and have fun and be awesome in it.
All I really want to do is make a difference.
