"Leave your stepping stones behind, something calls for you. Forget the dead you've left behind, they will not follow you."

2/3/10

Sometimes, it takes a moment of unbearable frustration and tears to make way for the ability to move on. Sometimes, it's easy to feel so stuck in a situation that it's easy to say "I can't do this!" or "I just want to give up and go home...". Sometimes, and only sometimes, it's possible to become so overwhelmed that all you can do is scream to the sky to stop the world so you can get off, only to realize that in the time it took you to yell pointlessly, the world kept going, and now things are even more messed up than they were. And sometimes, after all of this negativity and pointlessness, it's possible to see that the part of you that's not about to jump off a cliff is a lot stronger than you give her credit for, and when all is said and done, the best day of your life and the worst day of your life are both 24 hours long.

These past three months have been a test in every way. Living with such a large group of people, learning to navigate a complex city, pushing my tolerance limits, dealing with my changing opinions, missing home but not wanting to go home, and in general just being thrown into a pool of things I've never had to handle before. I've been so tossed and turned that I'm not entirely sure who I am anymore, and it scares me. Moving to Bat Yam means a lot of things, many of which I mentioned in my last post, but more than anything, it means the beginning of the end of YC. The thought that Jerusalem went by in a mili-second and now we have that same amount of time left is honestly a bit mind-blowing. I know I say that a lot, but it's true! None of my years in high school ever went by this quickly, and considering that when I came for the first time, five weeks seemed like a lifetime, I think it says a lot about how much I've changed that I can look at the next three months as an incredibly short amount of time. You have no idea how strange it is that the next time I pack up all my things, it will be to load them onto a plane to go home. I almost wrote "to go home to face reality", but I don't even know what reality is anymore. I used to think reality was wherever I found myself in a given moment, but now I'm not sure. Everyone keeps saying that I'm still preparing myself for "real-life", but when does "real-life" start? Am I not really living yet? Is being on my own in a foreign country still not enough to qualify? I'm still coming to terms with this question. In some ways, I want to go home, get an apartment and start my life, but in other ways, I feel like I'm still not even ready for college. It's a strange in-between...

All I can say for now is that tomorrow is moving day...
All my Love,
Rachel