Free from fear
[ Home ]I am writing this post in the airport waiting for my flight to my grad school. It suddenly struck me that, the new chapter of my life is really happening, despite everything.
I have been the most anxious for traveling in the past week leading up to my departure, even more so than when I first left home for the college. In a way, I am entitled to worry - it is an eighty-hour trip to a country I have never lived in before. All that what-ifs for COVID testings, the airline regulations, the customs, and the self-isolation rules. Considering the furthest I have travelled to in the past 18 months of my stay-home remote life was to a city 2 hours from my hometown, it is all excruciatingly overwhelming.
The past 18 months feel like a lost period in my life. I hate to be the one who’s all so privileged but ever so negative. Yet, I cannot lie to myself how disempowered I felt about my career and life in the past months. I am so unreasonably behind goals, and with that, I felt incredibly worried for my transitioning to the graduate program, where many of my peers seem to be achieving what I could only hope for and beyond in the pandemic months. Oh, do I even speak English still? And the social aspect...
All these anxiety, to my surprise, just magically disappeared when I waved goodbye to my worried parents and went through security checks. I would not bore you with the million different things I tried out to combat this pre-departure, pre-school year anxiety all to no avail. The thing is, when I swiftly removed my laptop and portable chargers from my bags for security check, it suddenly struck me - I know this. I know how to do all this, and I have done this. In a moment of strange euphoria, that cliche of “trusting your intuition” suddenly made sense to me. I know this, and for the things I do not know, the unplanned, and the unknown, I have my intuition.
I still have more than 50 hours ahead before I can enter self-isolation and deal with the food and school situations. But here and now, I feel free from something that had me engulfed for so long. Finally, it seems that a future with promises is awaiting.
If life is about timing, then what timing is about