Launching Pad

It's only a matter of time until I move into the city that never sleeps - so close I can taste it. Taste the freedom, taste the new life. It's a whole new ballgame. I'm going to finally be able to go out after work (at least with no limitations of a train schedule), to meet more women - potentially date more as well. One would think I would be ecstatic, climbing the walls. In a way I am, but I'm also a bit irritable. Hard to believe, but I am. I just want things to happen with a flick of a wrist. I know Rome wasn't built in a day and that the best of things take time, but it's time. It's not even funny how much I am ready for this move, this change in my life. It's a similar feeling to when I went off to college. Cleaning and packing up your closets, your memories - bringing them to some place new. I'm ready.

Yet this move is far more life-changing than college. This is the delayed step towards independence that most, if not all of my friends have achieved in the years since we have left college. My journey towards independence has been delayed due to a direct stop over to graduate school. That was 5 years ago. Even I meet those words with an audible sound of disbelief. I try not to think about that it has taken me 5 years to break away - 5 years on a launching pad. I was faced with delays, complications and perhaps the most annoying - false starts. I could feel the rumblings - the tiles ripping off and then something would pull me back onto the dock.

Independence has been delayed since graduate school due to jobs, while in my field of interest,were so low paying, that I would have essentially lost money. This isn't to say I haven't been able to have independence - it's just a limited form of it. That's fine, for we all take our own paths. It has been far from easy, especially within the last three years. In that time, three people very close to me (including my sister) got married, I was in a relationship with someone I loved and could see a future with and I began working for a major television network. So how is that far from easy one may ask?

I felt so disconnected at each of the weddings - lost, confused and even miserable. OK, so maybe miserable is pushing the envelope a little too much; but there was a feeling of nothingness - and just thinking about that feeling, haunts me, it causes me to tremble slightly. How could I feel such a way for my sister's day of bliss or for two of my best friends? It didn't seem right. But it was there. And maybe it was there because I wasn't there - I wasn't ready to open my life to another. That always has appeared to be my life story - not ready to let someone in.

I don't believe it's my career anymore that is keeping me from letting someone in. It is this overwhelming, borderline suffocating fear of letting someone into my heart, into my mind. Who in their right mind would dare to break into me? I often wonder this. I guess it also comes down to me; to whom do I feel at ease with enough, to listen to my fears, hopes and dreams. I've always been self-conscious and it's only now, as I have aged, that I realized my self-consciousness has been one of my greatest hindrances.

I'm scared for what lies ahead. I'm anxious in a positive way. I'm chomping at the bit. I'm ready to be released from the starting gate at the Kentucky Derby. It's now or never. It's time that these walls around me come tumbling down. It's time to feel, it's time to journey, it's time to walk into the bar and sit down and look into the eyes of a woman and say, "hi, I'm Lindsay...."

i'm off on a rocketship.. prepared for something new...ecstatic with the view, i am scared for the things coming and i want for the things i don't have.. cannot stand to be one of many..i'm not what they are.