It's always a little hard to stop myself during the semester to stop, write, and reflect through this blog, but I am grateful for the times that I do. I have five days before I finish the semester and find myself sick in bed, knowing deep down inside that I pushed my body too much these past few weeks. It's grad school, so it's always an on-going challenge of balancing my personal life, my school, and my work, but it is always a work in progress.
As the semester is coming to a close, lots of feelings are starting to surface: feelings of uncertainty, feelings of excitement, feelings of hope, but at the end of the day, I know it is normal to have all these feelings.
Time and time again, I say that life is a journey and my journey continues everyday. Finishing up this semester, I know I am one step closer to finishing a part of my journey and starting a new one.
This will be the biggest accomplishment of my life so far, one that I never even imagined fulfilling just a few years ago. But it is the closer that I get to this accomplishment that these feelings start to arise. Where will I go next? How long is it going to take for it to feel like home? Will I love my job? Will I connect with students? Is this the place where I will start building my life? And the answer to all of these questions is I don't know.
It's a bit terrifying, to be honest. I took this leap of faith a year and a half ago moving to Miami to start grad school and the time is coming for me to take a leap once again. It was my first experience moving away from home and I continued on my journey when I lived in North Carolina during the summer. It's gotten a little bit easier, the whole transition thing. I know what to expect. I know that I have to make an effort to connect with different people and start finding the places I like to go and things I like to do, but it's a lot sometimes. As I think about my next journey, I try to think if this is it. Will my life be filled with moving around the country to continue doing what I love? Will finding home be not within places, but within myself? When will I finally pick one place to settle down? They are all questions I think about daily, but they are sometimes the questions that I force myself to put aside.
It is a saying I first heard from my NUFP family and I decided it was the perfect phrase to describe my whole experience: Feed Your Butterflies. It is when you're nervous to do something, but there is just something in your gut telling you to go for it--to just do it. I feel that a lot of times, people have butterflies in their stomachs and they don't pay attention to them and they're too scared to take a risk. That is the moment when you need to take the risk. It is a message I continue to spread and teach to my students--a message that my mentors taught me: to work hard, take risks, live life and--most importantly--never settle.
It is a message that I am writing to myself to look back on in a few months when I start feelings those butterflies in my stomach, feed your butterflies.
No comments:
Post a Comment