I don't want to be afraid to do anything. Ever.

But sometimes I am.

There's so much coming my way this year: good and bad and everything in between. My life takes a permanent change after this year. It's so much different than high school, where I graduated and moved on to more schooling. Now I'm supposed to move onto the Big Life and Careers and Marriage and somehow turn out successful in it all... It's this gigantic vortex of unknown that keeps getting harder and harder to plan ahead for.

The solution to the change is pretty easy. It's what I've always done before: follow my heart, trust my impulses, and let the rest of the chips fall as they may. But I still get completely wound up in the anticipation of what's to come sometimes, and all the things I can't plan for seem too big too process. It feels kind of like taking a giant inhale of air, capturing it in my lungs and weighing it with my feelings before letting it all out at once in one great gust. And I guess that's all it is, really—moving forward. One giant breath, letting it out, and then taking another... pulling in all the positive and releasing all the negative again and again.

Now if I could just invent some outlet to channel all this pent-up anticipation before it corrodes my brain.

I’ve been on such extreme blogging hiatus that coming back is a little daunting. OK, that’s a lie— it’s actually pretty exciting, but the task of filling in all the blanks I’ve left in this journal since I romantically jetset off to France for a couple months makes me anxious.

I’m just going to come right out and say it: France sucked.

Every reader who's not a student at Savannah College of Art and Design will find that depressing, probably a bit surprising, but generally acceptable. Any reader who is a SCAD student is (guaranteed) currently staring at their screen in open-mouthed, abject horror because every— and I mean every— student that has done the Lacoste off-campus program claims it to be the “best experience of their, like, whole entire life.”

Half of their claim is true— it was an experience, and I’ll go so far as to say that half of it was enjoyable. But there was another half— a deep, dark, secret half that yearns for the blood of the innocent— that downright sucked.

I’m not in the mood to hash out (or willing to maliciously bore you with) all the details that made my stay in France a gigantic heaping portion of Fail, so I’ll skip ahead to the part where my life started to bring me home again:

I was flying on a plane by myself. It was the first time I’d ever flown alone, and to make the experience as traumatic as possible, I choose to lose my solo-flight virginity in a non-English speaking country. I got there too early, waited in line for the wrong ticket desk, used the wrong French word to order my breakfast, and spent two hours spread across a cushionless airport bench drumming the beat to Lady GaGa songs on my breastbone while French suits stared apathetically at me from across the waiting area. I fidgeted, checked my gate number a thousand times just to make sure one more time that I was in the right spot, and waited with all the anticipation in the world.

I was going to meet my best friend. More importantly, I was going to meet a shining beacon of the love and normality I’d left in America.

The entire flight, I clutched my fingers around the tattooed heart on my chest trying, as I had been for the last two months, to squeeze out some of the love I’d placed in there before making the 5,000 mile journey. I prayed for us to meet up safely— for everything to go smoothly (unlike the previous entirety of wreckage known as my France experience), and when we finally met up, I felt safe for the first time in months.

We made our way together across Europe, literally cheering as we left France for the United Kingdom (read: English Speaking Countries, thank god!), and once we’d had enough, we accomplished what I’d been most looking forward to: we flew on a plane that landed in the United States of America.

In the first weeks back, I shed all remaining symptoms of French depression and learned how to live my life again— how to be the me I couldn’t seem to dig out in France. I hugged people I truly loved, slept in a bed that didn’t bruise me, returned to Savannah, fully enjoyed driving a car again, ordered food in English, laughed with friends… I felt that piece of me that had been missing the last three months slide back into place, and smiled again.

There's nothing like coming home.

So, for anyone that doesn't know: I'm finally inked. Two more photos of it under the cut.

It's permanent. They tell me it never comes off. I've been talking about getting it done for years now, so I guess it's really strange and sort of surreal that it's there every morning when I wake up. But I love it; I love what it represents in my life, and how something so small can encompass a feeling so infinite. I've realized that talking about it with others really makes me uncomfortable though, because it is something so personal, and I feel like no explanation I could verbally give will ever make them fully understand. I don't know, it's weird.



( PEOPLE ARE ALWAYS LIKE, 'WHAT IS WRONG?' ABSOLUTELY NOTHING, THAT IS JUST MY FACE )

I found this quote today; I can't get over how me it is:

"Over the years I have developed a picture of what a human being living humanely is like. She is a person who understands, values and develops her body, finding it beautiful and useful; a person who is real and is willing to take risks, to be creative, to manifest competence, to change when the situation calls for it, and to find ways to accommodate to what is new and different, keeping that part of the old that is still useful and discarding what is not."

One more day left in America. ... Yeah.

"It doesn't count if you believe in yourself when it's easy to believe in yourself. It doesn't count if you believe the world can be a better place when the future looks bright. It doesn't count if you think you're going to make it when the finish line is right in front of you.

It counts when it's hard to believe in yourself, when it looks like the world's going to end and you've still got a long way to go.

That's when it counts. That's when it matters the most."

I wish everyone in the world could figure this out. I wish a lot of things for a lot of people lately. Mostly I wish I were in France already, waking up to mountains and thousand-year-old buildings. Thirty more days to go...

It's not about smitten couples. It's not about solitary singles. It's not about cards or flowers or candy hearts. It's not even about Saint Valentine (who you may be surprised to find you know nothing about).

It's just about love: the love you give to other people— any creature tall or small— and the love you give to yourself.

You, my valentine, are loved.

A woman stopped me in the parking lot on my way into Fresh Market today. She was halfway to the store herself, pushing a cart that was making a god-awful amount of noise. When she caught sight of me, she stopped, and asked if I would take the cart inside for her. "I'm just too lazy," she said. I shrugged, took it from her, and kept walking. I just assumed that she had mistakenly thought I was an employee or something on accident. I took the cart inside, grabbed what I needed and left.

Twenty minutes later, I'm across the street in the main lobby of Publix (where I can actually afford to buy groceries), desperately trying to pry a cart away from the rest with absolutely no success. As all mature, functioning adults of society would, I got pissed off and gave the cart I was trying to remove a really good kick. It shook, rattled, and then... nothing happened. Whoa, shocker there! I was just about to do something really drastic and most likely embarrassing when a man coming out of the store said, "Here, take this one." He unloaded his three (literally, I counted) items out of the cart and rolled it toward me.

It was such a simple equation: help someone, someone helps you.

I wish, I wish, I wish.

I have a thousand wishes, and I'm really just praying the one that is you comes true.