Connecting the Dots

Hello again my dear reader buds! Sorry for the long absence, it's been a bumpy but overall great road! I have been feeling sad for leaving this blog dormant but I will tell you why I did it.

I was not particularly comfortable seeing the posts I'd filled it with on my Peace Corps adventures in Guatemala. This is due to the fact that I ended my time in Peace Corps after about four and a half months down there.

I don't for a second regret the experiences I was so fortunate to be a part of. I also don't regret leaving.

After three months of cultural, language, and job training, I was placed in the site where I was to spend the next two years. Nothing about the amount of time I'd be away from states or the fact that I had to live a lifestyle very different from that in the US had anything to do with my leaving. I relished the opportunity to live abroad, take bucket baths, kill a chicken for dinner, and sleep with all manner of insect and who knows what else crawling around my room. In these aspects, I make the perfect candidate to gleefully lead the life of a Peace Corps Volunteer. What I hadn't anticipated was that which went on inside my head. Feelings of inadequacy, not smart enough, strong enough, outgoing enough, innovative enough, just plain old not good enough. These are feelings that I've battled for many years now. Feelings that bring me down to depths that I can't see a way out of.

Depression is a well known disease in my family. Many of us have been and are struggling with it. No matter where I go, I can't seem to escape it. I couldn't escape it, not even in another country. So there I sat, disbelief filling my entire being as I hung up the phone after having talked to the Peace Corps nurse about how horrible I was feeling. Such an awful, familiar feeling.

From there I left my site to take the long bus ride to Antigua where I met with the therapist at the Peace Corps office. After telling her about the past and current me, together we decided that going back to the states was the best option. There I would have easy access to all that I would need to help get me out of that hole.

So suddenly Guatemala faded off behind me and I'd returned to the states.

Connecting the dots between that point and this one now, I would say that there was a good deal of therapy involved, in both person and pill form. I've been living with my parents (ahh, just another fun and humiliating thing to share with all the world, all you readers!) and have been auditing classes as my local community college. Between classes and unemployed loser-dom, I've managed to make a few side excursions. North Carolina, New York, Nicaragua, Florida..you get one guess on which was my favorite!

So life is plugging along and now I'm taking a new route. Zig-zagging through life is nothing new, but it is certainly something I have really enjoyed. And continue to. Not knowing where I'll be a year from now..hell, six months from now!

Um, the dots are getting closer, right? Well I'm in classes until May and by the end of March I hope to know which (if any) grad school wants to take me as an aspiring writer/journalist. So there, dots connected. Now I just have to fatten up the line between them in posts to come...

Thanks for listening..er, reading.