Step 1: Get Rid of Anything and Everything Holding You to the Ground

Today I decided to sell everything.

It's something I've been thinking about for a while.  It makes sense.  I can't take anything with me.  I mean maybe a few things I need for Israel or can wear in Israel that are either useless or inappropriate for the Peace Corps and vice versa but for the most party I can have 50 lbs of stuff.  Nothing more.  And I will be gone for so long that it hardly seems worth it to keep it all in storage.  How much of it will I actually want after 3 months in Israel and 27 months (with the very real possibility of extending to 51 months) in West Africa with the Peace Corps?  And plus.  I need all the money I can get for this adventure so liquidating my assets is just generally a good idea.

However, there's a huge difference between deciding that it would be a good move to sell all of your possessions and actually deciding to do it.  An even bigger difference between that and advertising the sale of all of your possessions to everyone you know.

It hit me about when my desk was leaving my room to my friend Danielle's car with my favorite collection of e.e.cummings poems and a stack of my clothes (for the low low price of $35) that this was absolutely insane.  I was raised in a home.  A fixed location full of my wonderful loving family and a lot of things that I was told we needed to live.  We left but we always came back.  When I moved it was to another fixed location.  Perhaps these years of slowly moving to shorter and shorter leases was preparation.  Maybe I should have gotten used to it when I was hitching around Europe or setting up my bandas in Moyo Hill or KBC (in East Africa) but I never trained for this.  I never trained for a 50 lb bag for 4.5 years.  As I am now, I just can't do that.

Looking at it logically, I know I will accumulate plenty of crap in that time and that after 51 months in one place I will be doing the same mad scramble.  But that will be half a world and a lifetime of experiences away.  The things that you "need" here are not the same there.  It finally hit me as I looked at that big empty space where my desk used to be that everything is going to be so different.  Yeah the food will be different and the language and the people but, more importantly, I'm going to have to be different too.

The necessity for adjustment, patience, and adaptation has never seemed more real and it's terrifying.  I've been wildly alternating between exhilaration and horror for the past few hours as my things and the memories that go with them have been flying out of my room.  Just when I was starting to panic, a little bubble appeared on my laptop window with a face I haven't seen in a long long time.  Since her wedding, in fact.

Carry GAYNOR was online.  For real real online.  And lucky me got to talk to her.  She was so thrilled for me to get rid of everything holding me down.  And her excitement was contagious.  In between listening to that beautiful laugh that all of us from SFS love so much and telling her all of my insane stories (the woman is just so darn patient with my ridiculous self) I let it all sink in.  And I'm okay with it.  I'm okay with the distinct lack of plans and I trust myself and my skills to get myself through this.  I'm ready to change.  Moreover, I'm excited to change.

I've been reading loads of blogs about Peace Corps experiences to get me ready for this and one girl wrote that most Peace Corps volunteers are running from something.  I'm sure I'm running from a whole heck of a lot but hopefully I'm running towards something as well.  At the urging of the wonderful Carrie, I've started this blog of my own.  Hopefully two or three years from now a terrified up and coming volunteer can read this post and not feel so overwhelmed by this whole process.  Knowing what the rest of my posts are probably going to be like (based on my life thus far), they will still be terrified.  But hey.

Step one to flying is removing anything holding you to the ground.... so everyone come buy my stuff!