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august 19th, 2009

August 19, 2009

This entry is going to be one of those entries that will rip my heart apart, one of those entries that will keep me in a bad mood for the rest of the day. But I’ve come to a realization, and I’ve got to get it out of my system. I’ve come to the realization that I’m very afraid. Ever since that bad thing happened this summer, I’ve been afraid to leave any of my comfort zones. A brief conversation that I had with a few people yesterday really opened my eyes in terms of this realization.

“So, where do you want to go to college?”

“Ah, I don’t know. Maybe UGA.”

“Don’t go to UGA, you’ll hate it.”

“You should go to NYU.”

“Or Boston, that’s a nice place.

And at that instant, I froze up inside. For years I had wanted to get out of Georgia and settle in some better place up north like New York or Boston or maybe even Utah. For years I had promised myself that I would never return to Macon and never resort to moving back to my home state. There was no reason for me to stay in the South: I hated the weather, I hated the people, and I hated living in a city where anonymity would not be promised. For years I have wanted to move on and do better things than, say, write for the Macon Telegraph, or worse, not write for a living at all. All my life, I’ve enjoyed visiting a variety of places and dabbling into new cultures, habits, and ideas. But yesterday I officially realized that I’m scared to go to NYU and Boston College and any other place that’s not in this state. I’m scared to leave my comfort zone, and UGA or Emory could easily be my comfort zone. I know lots of people that are applying to UGA and Emory, and a few that go there, so I wouldn’t be perpetually alone like I was this summer. I’ll be three hours away from home at the most. Nobody would have to worry about flying up to see me, and I wouldn’t have to fly down to see anybody. I’m setting up all of these precautions for myself, like a mother who knows that her baby will wander into danger. If I’m only a few hours’ drive away from Macon, then I can just drive home one day, curl up in my bed, and have somebody hold me instead of doing something stupid, like checking myself into the hospital again. I can come home and heal in a safe environment rather than basically lock myself in my dorm, refuse to eat, and lie in an uncomfortable twin bed, panicking. I can just run home to my family, be babied and comforted, and have somebody kiss my wounds and secure them with a Looney Toons band-aid to make everything better. And when I went back to Atlanta or Athens, things would be better, and the closeness of that comfort would keep me sane until things got better. It wouldn’t matter if something bad happened to me, because I could go home and everything would be fine,

Everything would be fine.

 

As everybody knows, some things are inevitable. If you don’t eat, you’ll get really hungry. If you don’t brush your teeth at night, your mouth will taste bad in the morning. If you get caught chewing gum or texting during class, you’re screwed, and will be in detention after school next Friday. From my experience at Harvard, I have come to the decision that if I have a bad anxiety attack in a strange new place, then that anxiety attack will reach extreme proportions and whatever results will be just as bad. I’ve already established that I work best under routine. College will not be routine to me, at least not in the beginning, and especially if I have to make a fresh start. There is no way that I won’t have some kind of anxiety attack, if not a minor nervous breakdown. There’s no way to avoid it, it’s just not possible. So let’s say I went to NYU. While I do know New York quite well, I do not know anybody in the future class of 2014. Some knowledge will only get me so far, and I won’t have a parent to hug around the shoulders up in New York. There’s an easy recipe for an anxiety attack. Now let’s try a school in another city, like Boston, which would be much worse. I would be at least a year in the past regardless of what I was experiencing, and so many minor things would be cruel reminders of the bad thing that happened this summer. I would go nuts within my first day there, no question about it. I can’t handle that again, especially not if I’m alone, and I don’t even know how I independently handled what happened to me this summer, even though I did have a few crutches. And that’s the problem: because of my issues, because I am so prone to anxiety attacks and feeling depressed, because I depend on other people too heavily, and because I can hardly deal with myself sometimes, I cannot and will not be able to function alone.

 

I don’t have what it takes to be alone, and with the way things have been going, it seems that I never will. That’s the problem.