Ride of Steel! or A Really Sentimental Weekend

I spent this past weekend visiting friends in So Cal and spending a day at Six Flags. There were five of us, including two of my beloved housemates, all of us preparing for two year stints abroad in the near future. One girl is leaving for Kenya in two weeks, another for Senegal at the end of August, I am leaving for Turkmenistan in September, and two girls are in the latter half of the PC application process.

The weekend provided an opportunity to reflect on our individual preparations with each other, and at the end, we said good bye. One observation made last night was that none of us are old enough to be saying these kinds of good byes. None of us have any comprehension of what it means to leave everything that is familiar for two years. We said what could amount to permanent good byes to people who have shaped our development over the past four years. I do not regret my decision to join the PC and I am excited for the challenges and opportunities for growth it will provide, but I was reminded of how young I am this weekend, and how little experience I have in the world. I have never left my friends and family for such a long time before. I do not know what it will be like to not see them for possibly two years. 

We also talked about how this is an experience that will force us to confront who we are. All five of us consider ourselves to be adventurous, exploratory people, but travelling by ourselves to a new country will test that, and we have to be ready to accept it if we can't make it, if we really aren't what we have always thought ourselves to be. Which would be a huge blow to one's pride.

But this is the point of going. To test myself, to see who I am, to grow, to be challenged, to have an adventure. I am little, I am inexperienced, and I will probably be scared, but I want this, and I am grateful that I have friends that are going through this experience with me, however far away they might be.

Also, thank you to Tiffany for being a pansy with me on all of the roller coasters, and to Rachel for making me open my eyes on Superman even though you were terrified, too. You should become a crisis counselor.