Waiting, Wondering, and Wales

I think my biggest problem is waiting.  For a very long time, I really embraced the idea of "All Good Things for Those Who Wait." I still think that's true--but I wonder if I haven't taken it a bit too far.  I've always had an excuse to not do what I want to do--to daydream but not act.  All of them have made sense, and I think that they were the logical thing to do. 

The first time I found myself really saying "I can't do that yet," I was still a teenager, still a high school student.  Getting out of my parents house would be a hell of a trip, I would face all kinds of legal issues, and as a high school dropout I would have been in for a very long and very difficult road.

The next was while I was at Hollins, but by the time that I really truly just wanted to pack and run, I had already sunk so much money (and so much energy) into Hollins that I would have been really upset to walk away without a degree, and that's nothing in comparison to what my parents would have thought about it.  Likely, my father would stop talking to me all together.  While I might have finally been in a place that I wanted to be--I knew I wouldn't be at all happy with the situations that I would be in then with my family.

Now, it's loyalty to a friend.  I went into a yearlong lease with her, and I would not be willing to leave her in the lurch just to fulfill a need to get out of town, to do something that's probably really stupid. 

All very good reasons to wait.  But I don't want to wait anymore.

The other day I half-joked with my mother that I wanted to move to Wales.  I was reminded once again how much I loved visiting there, and how much I liked the way British TV was handled versus American TV, and I told her that my new life goal was to go and work for the BBC.  My mother didn't laugh at me, or suggest I think of something more realistic to do with my life, or even start to worry about the semantics of me actually being able to move out of the country, all options I thought might come from the joke. Instead she said, and I quote, "Well, did you go online and see if you could apply?"

For a moment I was stunned.  I think my response was some kind of sputtering about not even having a passport at the moment.  My mother made the point that if I was going to do something like that, then I should do it now, when the only person I really had to answer to was myself. She countered quickly with a "well, not right now, of course. But--you know what I mean."

And she has a point.  If I'm going to do something insane, "now" is the time to do it. Because of my lease, I'm in Shelton, CT until May.  In between then and now, I'm sure I will change my mind a hundred times--but in May, I am going somewhere.  Somewhere crazy. Somewhere that I'm not sure that I'll actually thrive, but somewhere where I want to go, while I've got the chance to answer only to me. Maybe LA. Maybe Wales. Maybe Australia. Maybe somewhere I haven't even thought of considering yet. But in May--or possibly June--I am going somewhere.

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