Goodbyes make me introspective...

The hardest part about leaving is giving up the potential of this trip. When I found out I was accepted to my program in Rome last spring I was ecstatic. There's so much excitement and promise surrounding going abroad. From March on I had the next 9 months of my life planned out(and for me having a plan is fun): finish spring semester, live in Houston for the summer working and planning O-Week, actually *do* O-Week, then go abroad for 3+ months and have the time of my life in Rome. All of those things have come and gone so quickly and now I'm more than halfway done with college and only two months away from my 21st birthday. These things are pretty obvious facts, but I'm not very familiar with them and so I feel like I have to write them down anyway.

There are very few actual milestones in life. Maybe I'm not saying this correctly, but what I mean is that there are no real fresh starts. There are birthdays, New Years, graduations, etc. but it's hard to really distinguish my life before and after these alleged turning points. There's not a single day that sticks out to me from the past 6 months as a "milestone," but I can say that somewhere in that time I've grown. It's like that creeping feeling I get when I look back on something I wrote in high school, or remember how a song made me feel a year ago, and it makes me realize I've matured or at least changed in some way.

I think what I've learned most thoroughly over the last several months is that growing up is accidental. If given the choice (especially at this junction when I don't have any of the rest of my life planned out) I would choose not to grow up. The thing is, growing up is hardly a conscious process. Instead it's going through things that are hard or unpleasant and surviving. It's crying for hours about something and feeling like things will never get better, until they do get better. And then using that for the future. I hate to admit this now, because I never believed it when I was younger, but there are a lot of things in life that you just have to live through to understand.

I wish I knew where my life was going. Not knowing at 16 or 18 was fine, because hey I hadn't even started college, and you figure things out in college. Well now I'm in college and I've been in college for a while now and at the very best I've found a few things that I don't want to do with my life, but I certainly don't have a five year plan or anything. What's frustrating is that I know everyone goes through this, and for some reason that bothers me. I don't want to be one of the befuddled mass of undergraduates! I want to be self-possessed and focused, because being unsure makes me afraid that I will end up in a cardboard box. I want to get a job because I'm tired of school, but maybe I need more school to get a good job!

At the moment I think my priority should be to not fail my finals, so I should do a little studying. I have my final paper completed but I still have three finals in the next three days. Eep.