Prove it to me

I have nothing else to worry about now. Well, not really, anyway. All of my finals are over; the test sheets have been bubbled in with my mechanical pencil, and the grades are now posted. I got the new job I was crossing my fingers for. I finished up my first week, in real grown-up work clothes (yes, I unpacked them again). I have most of the big pre-trip-planning done: that is to say, I’ve figured out when to get my hair highlighted and a pedicure gotten. Oh, and the plane ticket. Got that done, too.

Everyone asks me if I'm excited about my trip to France, and I can't really say that I am. I’m more just experiencing a prolonged bout of bouncy, queasy, purposeful nervous energy that is focused on the pinpoint hope of wanting everything to go well. I haven't always been the best traveler, so perhaps this trip is my way of proving to myself that I can do it. I have to prove myself to me all the time. I have to prove that I'm not afraid, that I can handle it, that I’m good enough to be in my own company. I have to ace all the tests, hold 2 jobs (I’m working on the second one right now), volunteer at the hospital, read the best bedtime stories, and have a perfectly clean bathroom floor just to show myself I’m good enough. A month-long study abroad program in France should be one more tick in my favor ... perhaps I will be good enough for myself eventually.

I'm aware, in a prickly-back-of-the-neck kind of way, that a 26-day trip with strangers in a foreign land is going to be life-changing, or at least perspective-changing. I'm like anyone else - a creature of habit. I am "afraid of unknowns," as my little brother would say. I am afraid of what a major perspective change might mean for my future, and for my self, and for my life, how I'm living it here and now. What if - while I'm thousands of miles away across the Atlantic Ocean, completely cut off (well, almost - we'll still have daily Internet access) from my loved ones and my culture and my home - I realize that I've been doing everything all wrong? What if, from the vantage point of far, far away, I see things that I wasn't ready to see, much less deal with? Does Amazon sell super-UV-and-harsh-reality-glare sunglasses – to help with the sharp brightness of space, time alone, and an insane amount of introspection?