It's completely surreal to me that I'm leaving for Connecticut tomorrow morning just a few hours from now. It feels pretty much just like any other night right now even though I know it's not. I left home from college and spent a couple summers interning in various places, but this feels different, more permanent.
When people have been asking me how I feel about leaving or living on the east coast, I've always answered with some form or combination of excited or nervous. Excited because this is the first time I'm really, really on my own. I get to truly be my own person far away from my home and basically everyone I know. I get to have a real job and make many more of my own decisions. Nervous because...well, the same reasons.
I think ultimately both emotions stem from my feelings about identity. In a completely new place, I get sort of a fresh start, a new chance to create and/or flesh out who I am. At the same time, in a lot of ways by moving so far away, I'm losing parts of myself too. It's weird to think about because do I really become a different person just by leaving one environment and going to another one? A lot of the time I (and I'd guess most, if not all of, us) find it easy to identify myself by factors that are easily picked out. What I look like, where I live, who I hang out with, etc. But, as I am learning extremely rapidly, these types of things can change so quickly and so drastically.
Leaving everything and everyone behind is teaching me that the only thing I can cling on to, and thus the only thing I can truly identify with, is my relationship with my God. It's not always perfect and often I falter, but I know that God is there to pick me up no matter how much I stumble. My relationship with Him and my belief that he is a good, loving, eternal God who has saved me and all mankind from a destiny of eternal damnation should be the basis of who I am and I want to work towards that each day. People and surroundings may change, but He does not, and as I'm getting ready for a huge move, I'm glad that I can hold on to that.
On a different note, we (my parents and I) will be spending the next few days driving across the country to my new home in Connecticut. This will be by far the longest road trip I've ever done, and I'm looking forward to a lot of boring roads and long naps while my dad is at the wheel. As disorganized and lazy and stupid as I can be, I will always be thankful to my parents for helping me out in this and I feel really lucky to have them in my life for this and many other reasons.
We'll pretty much just be straight driving and I don't even know if the places we're staying along the way will have wi-fi, but I'm going to try to tweet as much as I can, if only to keep myself from being too bored. But anyway, it's been a fun 22 years of my life on the west coast. I hope to make it back someday (someday soon, please), but I trust and leave everything in the hands of God because I believe His plans are better than my plans. Please do hit me up if you're ever on the east coast. See you on the other side.
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