Plateau

I feel I've reached a defining moment in my life. I've been sensing one coming for a while, but I admit to being blindsided as to what it was. I had already known from previous periods of growth that every gain contains an equivalent sacrifice.
 I hadn't considered just how steep the price of my journey might be.

Things are very much falling into place right now. Not in any concrete way, which was more of what I had vaguely projected, but on a very fundamental level that I have revisited and tilled so often I was surprised to see it could change the way it has
.
It's been a summer of many things, so far. I began by thinking I would gain things, but it turns out I've had to lose other things first. There are so many aspects of myself that I took as necessary and positive that have almost entirely waned on my horizon. The things I have started to gain are in an area wholly unexpected, and I dug my heels in against them at first.
I am having an unbelievable time.

I am excited for Africa.
The fear is still there, but so, so much less. I have two weeks, and I want it to start. I have things that need to be taken care of in the fall, and I have a feeling it is in the fall that the most dynamic phase of my life will be beginning. I hadn't realized how long I've felt afraid and stagnant and lost in a haze of vague possibilities and half thought-out plans.

Does that mean I have plans now?
Nope! I have absolutely no idea what my life is going to be. All I know for certain now is that it's going to be very interesting, and I'm going to love it very much.

I'm not afraid of not knowing now. I don't need to know now.
I'm going to know soon. I know in my bones that my life is going up from here. Maybe not professionally, maybe not linearly. But things have shifted in such a fashion that I've never known what a solid foundation I was meant to rest on, and build with.

I mentioned earlier that my birthday involved a bit of an emotional break down. It did, because I feel that this time last year marked the first shift in my year of of slow alterations that led to where I am now. I spent much of the day thinking of how I felt last year. What my goals were, what my life was, what my relationships and aspirations were. This year, I realized they were so far removed and so inaccessible that I felt I had to mourn what I was, so that I could begin to be something else.

 I took this trip to throw myself completely out my comfort zone, to gain perspective, to become stronger. I was out of my comfort zone alright, but I lost all the previous perspective I've ever received, and my perception of myself was stripped to the core. I had a very long, very intimate, and very drunk conversation with a new friend, and she told me she loved people who travel because you are so forced to become yourself. You are in surroundings that are unfamiliar, with cultural and speech bearings you don't recognize, and you can't rely on cues from other people or other experiences. It's always on the hop. You can't explain yourself clearly, you need to simplify every communication, every need, and every want. You become a no-frills version of yourself, and sometimes you are surprised at what you are without your trappings.

I broke myself into a thousand pieces about a week after I left, and I've very recently started piecing myself together. As someone I greatly respect remarked in wonderfully expressed extended metaphor about Lego's, "You still have all the same pieces. You've even found some new ones. You've broken it all up and started building again."

I think I found some of those hard-to-find corner pieces. Maybe some bridges, too.

I feel a bit silly at the seriousness of this tone, but I really am giddy about where I'm going from here. I came out the other side of a plateau expecting a new landscape to navigate, but I found it was empty space. I get to make the landscape myself. I have plans for myself, not concrete goals, but intangible personal changes that will be made. I don't know what I'll be when I'm done, but I know I'll be somewhere good.

I have an awful lot of faith in the universe right now. Actually, maybe it's faith in myself. I don't even think it matters which way I look at it, so long as I'm doing something with it.


Oh, I'm going to Rio De Janeiro on Friday. The Botanical Gardens, Copacabana, and Christ the Redeemer are on my list.