High school was a rough time for me. I was in and out of friend groups, suffered never-ending sports injuries and I really just felt like I didn't fit in with the people that I went to school with. Now I don't want you to feel sorry for me because I was still living a happy life and I had many friends outside of school but when I stepped on campus, I felt like I didn't belong. This feeling for over 40 hours a week was not the best so in order to cope, I would daydream. For three years, my sophomore, junior and senior years, I would fantasize about packing everything up and leaving for a trip abroad to start a new life somewhere else.
My sophomore year I spent most of my time dreaming about the various places I could go, my options were endless. The more I looked around, something about England kept grabbing onto me. I had gone a couple times when I was little but I didn't remember much so I spent the better parts of my junior and senior years going through virtual maps of England, researching places to visit. Not only did I look into where I should go, I researched flights, hotels, car rentals, etc. I must have made at least a hundred different plans to just buy a ticket and go but I never did.
Fast forward to college where I was given $3,000 as part of my scholarship to travel on any study abroad trip. Over the last four years I would wait desperately for a trip that I wanted to go on and that fit with my schedule but no such trip ever came up. It finally rolled around to my senior year, which I am two months away from finishing up, and I finally found a trip worth going on.
It is mid-March and I am only a few days away from leaving for London, UK and it is easily one of the last things on my mind. Here I am, a few days away from going to the place where I have been dreaming of going for over seven years now, and I barely know what's about to happen. In class over the past few months, my professor has been talking about all the various things that we are going to need to prepare for, what to pack, what the look out for, important things to be aware of, etc. but none of it has sunk in. It still hasn't hit me that in roughly two and a half days I will be on a flight to London.
I have had one of the busiest, most mentally taxing semesters of my life over these past few months between school, my personal life, and my various jobs, I have had my mind on pretty much everything else except for this trip. That is until my parents called me last week asking when they wanted me to bring my passport and telling me that they already have electric adapters that I can use. That's when it hit me that my trip was coming up and I needed to start preparing. So far I've made a list of everything that I am going to need to pack, I've ordered rain boots because I've never felt the need to own a pair before, I've gotten my passport, called my phone service provider, told both my debit card and credit card banks that I will be traveling, and I told my boss that I won't be able to work while I'm gone. That is it.
I know that I should feel stressed. Any normal person would totally be stressed about being extremely underprepared for a trip to any foreign country but it still hasn't hit me. I still have other school work and responsibilities that I need to take care of before I leave so my head is definitely more focused on those right now. I figure the stress and anxiety will kick in on my way to the airport, freaking out about whether I have everything or not. I will convince myself that I forgot everything as I'm getting on the airplane, but that's not for two and a half days so I'll deal with that when I get to it.
Don't get me wrong, I feel SO INCREDIBLY excited and SO SO grateful to be given this opportunity to travel anywhere, let alone LONDON--my mind just needs to catch up. I think it's for the best that once I get there, I just take in everything that is thrown at me for what it is. I think if I had been given the time and headspace to think too much about the trip, I would have spent hours virtually walking around the city. I would have planned every single detail about what I wanted to do rather than just going with the flow and letting the city lead me wherever it wants me to go.
I'll let you know it goes :)
