Post #5: Itchy Feet

If you're wondering why this post is numbered, see this post.  If you're wondering why I'm on #5, here's #6 and #7.  If you're wondering why I started at the end, it's because I decided to be difficult.  If you're wondering why I'm being difficult, you don't know me very well.

Six months after my 18th birthday, I established a really good habit of not staying in the same spot for longer than about 10 months, and balancing it all out with significant international travel.  I went to Israel when I was 18, then left for college for nine months and spent the summer at camp, a cycle I repeated my sophomore year.  I put a trip to Europe in-between, making the summer I spent at school add up to a record 11 months in one spot for my senior year of college.  I left for Scandinavia, moved home, then went to seminary.  I lasted five months of seminary before I went to Southeast Asia, then managed to stay roughly at seminary (minus pageant travels) for nearly a year and a half.  Then a year in Vegas, then another year and a half back.  Then a year lived overseas, broken into chunks.  Then I moved back here, and haven't moved since.

Sure, I've done some traveling since then.  Mexico, Jamaica, Australia, and New Zealand were all wonderful, and I had a great time.  But I've still managed to stay put, by and large, for the longest consecutive period in my adult life.  Same house, same bed, same job, same weather, same man.  (This is officially the longest I've ever been in a relationship.)  And while there is much to love, I have to admit: I'm getting pretty itchy feet.  I am not used to being in one place, doing one thing, for so long.

When I first started out in the real world, I was still certain that I would be headed out to school again very soon.  I was sure it would be somewhere far away, somewhere in a city or on a coast, at a big and prestigious university.  I would be moving again, because that is what I have known in what I can only jokingly refer to as my adult life.  And now, as itchy as my feet are, I'm beginning to wonder: do I want this because it is what I want, or because it's all I've ever known before?

I got a chance to meet an old friend for lunch while I was home for my sister's wedding.  She and I met up at the local cafe.  She brought photos of her recent trip, and I brought stories of the travails of growing up.  We both came to the table expecting to just catch up on life, love, relationships, and careers.  Instead, we stumbled upon a strange realization: we were both having the same third-life crisis.  We were both feeling pretty settled, pretty safe, pretty good about our lives where they were at, even though it wasn't quite what we'd imagined a decade ago that our lives would've looked like.  And that begged the question of whether feeling stable was something to embrace or something to fight.

Oddly enough, this realization was incredible.  I thought that my apprehension was particular to me somehow, whether because of my career or my personality.  Instead, it's more universal.  It's not because I'm some crazy girl who doesn't know how to be in one place for very long - although the fact that I haven't done that sure doesn't help.  It's more because this is the stage of life we're in.  Many of us at this general age have been roughly transient in most of our lives, and don't know how to do anything else.  Once we're given a chance to lead a steady, focused life, it feels weird.  We have two options.  We can fight it, or we can embrace it.


I'd like to think I can embrace it and not lose the part of me that likes to see, hear, experience, do, go, and be.  I can keep doing what I'm doing - because it's worthwhile work and I'm good at it - and that doesn't mean I'm settling, copping out, or running away.  If I change what I'm doing, whether to do something similar to now or something completely different, it will be because it is a good move for me, my future, and the life I share with my loved ones, and not just some kind of reactionary, fear-based leap.  This is good.  This is practical.  This is adult.


I guess I'm just going to have to find something else to scratch this itch.  The world is a big, weird, wild place, after all.