Flash back to December 2014
I sat in my old living room feeling quite out of place on the red plastic covered couch that soaked me in sweat while simply lounging around. I batted away incessant flies not even slightly deterred as I swatted one of their friends away for the 100th time that evening. My laptop screen glowed, and my eyes scanned Netflix as my parents and brothers slept upstairs. I was on a mission to find a Christmas movie.
I was feeling far from home and even farther from family. Quickly I became frustrated as I couldn’t find a title that, for just 75 minutes, would put my mind and heart at rest, as I felt that I was home for the holidays. It was just then when I felt something welling up inside of me. I wanted to cry. I wanted comfort. I wanted the next 5 months to go by quickly.
End of Flashback
7 weeks ago I arrived home from my Global Citizen Year and my family picked me up. I held them in my arms for the first time in what seemed like far too long. But as we scrambled into the car to head off for lunch I felt blank. I didn’t know what to say, or what to do. I felt like my entire being was stopped up. So as we arrived at lunch that same feeling from December of last year returned, except this time I didn’t know why, and I didn’t know what I wanted.
We walked into the restaurant and I mumbled something about needing to go the bathroom and waited for the door to close behind me as I burst into tears with confusion and fear clouding my mind and heart. This was not how it was supposed to go. I was supposed to return from this trip as Bennett 2000, recharged motivated and ready to take on the world, but I wasn’t. I’m not.
Since I have returned from Ecuador, I have had glimpses of the incredible positive transformation that is happening within me, but for the most part I feel less productive and “put together”. All in all I don’t feel like me. Now as someone who like to be in control and has grand plans for the present and future, this scares the s**t out of me.
What I remind myself is that I am in process. It was never about going, growing, and being. It is growing, growing and growing. The process continues whether I run off to east asia, Europe or 2 hours south of where I grew up, to attend college. I have just had my world twisted and the key to that is that this is all my world. My world doesn’t change when I am in Thousand Oaks, CA. I would be lying if I said I didn’t hope the extreme high and difficult lows start to level out soon, but right now all I can do is take a breath, open up and have a little patience.
