"home"

Wow. Less than a week now until the 1 year anniversary of being a PCV. The reality of the 4s leaving this coming week feels less abstract than the fact that my group is entering its 2nd year of service. I still wake up sometimes and have the strange sensation that I'm not quite in Kansas, well Seattle, anymore.

My regular blog readers know that I was recently in Seattle for a visit home. Excuse me while I enter unfamiliar territory for this blog, a foray into my own personal feelings about my being here in Azerbaijan thusfar. There are a million different reasons to join Peace Corps and the majority of us join for a mixture of selfish and altruistic motives. Allow me to reveal one of my more selfish ones.

I was afraid my life was beginning to stagnant back in Seattle. All the signs were there and even when I'd try to break cycles, there was always something or someone who'd manage to draw me back in. I knew it was time to get out of Seattle, a place I adored, loved and was loved. By my last birthday back in the States (gosh, almost 2 years ago now), after the long Thanksgiving weekend of partying hard, I came upon a few realizations. The biggest of which was that it was reaching utmost importance I begin putting things into action to move onto the next part of my life which was a result of me deciding I was no longer a kid and starting to get too old to have been living my life the way I had. I had to get out.

Between Thanksgiving and my 24th birthday I'd set up a 3 tiered solution to my need to leave. By Labor Day weekend of 2007 I had resolved to no longer reside in Seattle because I'd a) be serving in the Peace Corps; b) be teaching English abroad in someplace like Korea, Taiwan, Spain, etc.; or c) have packed up and moved to either San Francisco or Chicago (a city I'd never been to but sounded interesting). The most lofty and ambitious of these options worked out as you all know.

When I left in June 2007, I knew I was signing up for all sorts of unforseeable challenges. One that has most recently focused into view is leaving home indefinitely for the first time. Up until I joined Peace Corps, I'd never been so faraway from my family for so long without knowing when I'd be returning. Even during my study abroad during college, I still had family nearby in a culture that I could make a lot more sense of easily and it was only for a few short months. I left at the end of summer and was home in time for Thanksgiving. The time I spent away nothing changed aside from the fact that my then 4 year old baby brother who only spoke Vietnamese when I left now only spoke English (still true) when I arrived home.

This time I left at the beginning of one summer and came home for a short while towards the end of the following one. About 14 months by my count - and things have changed. I no longer had a room at my parents house. My things were scattered in random storage places in boxes though. There was rampant suburbanization in the sleepy lakeside neighborhood where the folks live, cookie cutter shopping complex although the Seahawks training facility nearby is pretty neat. My old stomping ground of the Pike/Pine corridor on Capitol Hill has mostly died down. I went to an old haunt and was terribly surprised to find no wait to get in or for a drink.

My younger brother is doing quite well these days, which I'm super proud of!! Most my friends are doing better for themselves as well, which again, I'm genuinely quite happy for them. It was strange talking to them, listening to their lives which I've been absent from for the last year. I thought going home would be like reading a favorite and well-loved book, being able to pick it up anywhere knowing where your place is exactly and knowing...well just knowing how everything fit in together. I didn't feel that. As much as I love everyone and know that it's reciprocated - I felt out of place in a big way. I found myself oddly eager to "get back to my life in Azerbaijan" even though I haven't been the happiest of campers in my time thusfar here.

In the winding down of my days home, I realized that I was stuck once more in a weird "in-between" state of my life. One part remembering the great life I had, stuck in the past more or less that I was trying to move onto the next part of my life from and one part in Azerbaijan, knowing that this will eventually set me on a path to (more) adventure-seeking and dream-chasing, however they'll manifest themselves in my future. I've asked myself on many a frustrated day of service, what in all that is holy inspired me to leave the great things I had going for me for what I'm currently living? Yet being "home" made me realize how much I can't go back to what life was.

I made the choice to leave and seeing life as it went on without me back in the States has enabled me to quit dragging my feet about what I left (or at the least, do it a few iotas less) and look forward to what there is yet to come for me, whatever I can dream or have the good fortune of stumbling upon. Dealing with daily discomfort has oddly enough, become comfortable for me. Knowing that this 2nd year for which I have a ton of project ideas (hopefully a few will actually get executed) is essentially a 12 month "transitional/waiting period" is a strange sort of exciting. Had I never bit the bullet and said farewell to home, I would've never had this opportunity to be doing what I'm doing or learn what I'm learning. In conclusion, I end this entry with two words, what's next?