An End to a Beginning
It was one of those nights. The kind you wish you could replicate and live over and over. There was an exhilarating feeling swirling in the crisp late summer air, and I felt unequivocally free. It wasn’t too often that I felt this sense of freedom and excitement; as a student, I spent much of my time in class, writing papers, studying for exams, and everything in between. Most of my summer had been spent running between classes and my part-time job cleaning vacation rentals, and trying to escape the heat while desperately trying to make progress on my master’s thesis; which taunted me all summer long. Things felt dull, and as I admitted to my best friend Eva the day before -I was stuck. Stagnant. Floating in a murky pond of “should’s”, “could’s”, and “if only’s”. As I see it now, sometimes you have to get terribly uncomfortable before you can muster up the courage to make a drastic change, and take control of your life again. I had gotten so uncomfortable with my day to day, and the mundane reality of my situation, that I was suddenly forced into a choice which I had never had to make before. My life up until then, had unremarkably gone according to plan. However, I would get home at the end of a long day, too hot and exhausted to cook myself dinner, only to have to clean up, get organized for the next day, and do it all again. The moment that I realized that I didn’t want to go to bed because the morning would come too quickly, I realized that this is no way to live. So as I had the first conversation that would liberate me from the prison I had created for myself, my voice trembled, my heart pounded in my chest, my palms sweat, but I did not hold back.
