treehouselights: The unsettling-ness of settling in

One month ago today our “going away” party took place. I hate to admit it- in case it offends anyone who attended- but it sucked. I’ve decided that going away parties are some of the worst kind of parties and I will try my best to never attend one again, especially not my own. It sucked because of how hard it was emotionally to see everyone but not have any real conversations (given the circumstances of the amount of people there with whom we had to make sure and converse, noise level, etc.). But it did re-enforce to me how important (and awesome) it is to upkeep relationships by keeping in contact with people on some level. I can say that that's been one good thing about being in Atlanta- I've had lots of good, albeit mediated by technology, conversations with friends and family.

Now that the negativity is out of the way, I shall try to give an update of our lives in Atlanta since we left...with just a few dashes of negativity here and there.

The road trip here was, objectively speaking, a very good road trip. I say "objectively" because WHILE it was happening, it was heart-wrenching. But, just as I suspected based on what I learned in "communication studies" classes and from what I observed through experience, I was in shock and didn't even cry once during the entire trip. Take that as a sign not that I had no feelings about it but that I was so overwhelmed that my body could not allow itself to express the emotion, lest it should be too much for it to handle. Normally when you're on road trips, you wait impatiently for every new mile marker to see the mileage go lower and lower, signaling that you are nearing your destination. But for me, it was quite the opposite-I hated seeing the miles towards our destination decrease by the minute. I kept sincerely hoping that this was all a long, months long dream. And I kept wondering, why do people choose to do these things (i.e. move away from their entire family and friends group) and HOW do they do it? How are people capable of so much emotion and pain that they CHOOSE to go through?

More objective comments on the road trip...Normally I like to control things, but I had no fire in me to care about much, so I let Bree dictate where we would go and how long we would stay. We ended up in god awful places like New Mexico for the first night, and Arkansas for the second. For our last leg of the trip, we arrived in Nashville on an early evening and went to a couple of places recommended to us by Stephanie, who lived there for the last 5 years(ish) but recently moved back to AZ. The next day, we did some more exploring and went to a coffee shop that Stephanie used to be a manager at...or so we thought. She told us to bring up her name to the barista so that we can possibly score a discount, but the barista's face was as blank as my bank account when we mentioned Stephanie's name. Turns out we drove about 10 miles to end up at the entirely wrong coffee shop. It was still a great experience though with good coffee.

We arrived at our apartment on Friday night at 8pm...overall, we made good time, considering we left Phoenix on Tuesday at around noon.

The first couple of weeks were spent obliterating our savings to stock up our aparment with food and decorate it Bree and Carmen (Brarmen) style. It was fun to be kept busy with this during the day, but come night time, the shock of having been ripped from my home wore off and I experienced the emotions full blast. Never a night since I've been here that the pillow hasn't felt my tears.

On top of feeling entirely alone (well, except for Bree being here), I felt intense intense dread about attending UGA and being ripped apart yet again and even further from home and from Bree too this time. Why in the world was I doing this to myself, I kept asking? What was so important about a PhD that I would literally sacrifice EVERYTHING (although temporarily...but 4 years is a long time) to pursue it? The answer became clear on the morning I had to wake up and drive to campus, almost 2 hours away, to square away my paperwork. And the answer was this: Getting a PhD is NOT important enough to make me live alone and not be in my own home for 4 years. Enough damage is done having moved 2,000 miles away from AZ- why another 70 miles, away from the only person I have here, the person I love most? So that morning, I decided not to attend UGA anymore and to re-apply to Georgia State (GSU), where I had originally been accepted to (even before UGA) but denied their offer so that I can take UGA's. The reasons for making that choice are complicated and unnecessary to retell, but the premise of my new choice to go to GSU instead of UGA (other than the fact that it is 5 miles away from our home as opposed to 70 miles) is that my relationships are more important to me than the prestige of a program. While I enjoy teaching and especially learning, I don't need a PhD from the best school to do that. GSU, while not as top-ranked as UGA, is a great school for someone like me who is more willing to follow her relationships around the country than to follow her career around the country.

The short of it is that GSU accepted me back but did not have funding left for this year, so I will be attending there next year. In the year I have off, I intend to teach online (which I am already doing), perhaps nanny part-time (as a way to deal with my intense feelings of missing my nephews and nieces...), read, photograph, and explore the city. It sounds like an incredible opportunity to live leisurely and interestingly, but I am a person who always needs to be busy in order to feel ok, so it will be an enormous challenge for me to have a lot of time on my hands. I hope that a good amount of that time will also be spent visiting Phoenix and Chicago. In fact, I am visiting Phoenix next week for a few days! I haven't been this excited about a trip since I was maybe 15 years old. I can't wait to be around my friends and family!

Everybody imparts the knowledge that moving away from home is going to be one of the greatest experiences of your life, if at least for the fact that you will learn a lot about yourself. It certainly hasn't been one of the greatest experiences of my life (yet...), but here is what I have learned about myself so far. This is not meant as a compliment, at all, but rather quite the opposite: I am deeply, deeply empathic. I have such a deep reservoir for emotions that every emotion is felt, I think, many times over than the average person feels it. Again, this is not meant as self-inflation because I absolutely hate that I have such a great capacity for emotion. I do think there are benefits, of course (i.e. I empathize with people very much- I can cry in a split second upon seeing someone else in pain). But mainly, it causes great pain as I not only feel pain so deeply, but feel the pain of others not understanding how much it is felt. I've always known this about myself, but have not confronted it often. I did confront it when I had to decide whether I wanted to go to UGA. When people would tell me, "You'll get used to it" and things of the like, they did not and do not understand that I WON'T get used to it. I'm just not built like most people- I can keep an emotion for my entire life. And what this has taught me is to accept some of my fears and choose things based on them. While we're always taught to not give in to our fears and act on them, I learned that some things that you fear (i.e. moving away from home) tell you something very true and real about yourself, and sometimes it's ok to listen to those fears and act on them. For me, my fear was being entirely alone in a city with no support system, and I gave in to that fear and realized it isn't something I am willing to do. Perhaps I am able to, but I am not willing to. I've come to appreciate life more in the sense that life can end at any moment- why choose to do something that makes you miserable, even if it will pay off in the end, when you don't even know if you'll wake up tomorrow?

Scary skies driving through Arkansas. The humidity was so bad, we had steam coming out of the car vents. We thought we were overheating and pulled over twice. After some research on our handy iphones, we learned that this is a normal phenomenon in the humid south.

The nearer we got to Georgia, the greener the scenery.

A beautiful scene I felt like we should turn around for and take pictures.

Lots of weird looking bugs here in the south.

We have been eating like kings.

The "wrong" coffee shop that we went to. Pretty cool decor.

(Sorry these are all out of order...) Bree and I on our last day of packing before moving. Heart wrenching.

This was the first day of our road trip...the pretty parts of AZ before entering gross New Mexico.

I kicked Bree out of the car and made him walk a mile...

Not happy about the current situation.

Only sold in New Mexico....

Bree is a vandal.

Who HASN'T seen this...

I sold a book on amazon while on the road trip. Luckily, I had it with me, so I made Bree stop on the highway when we saw a huge sign that read "Post Office." Here he is, on the way back from it, with package still in hand...fail.

Quite foggy.

Tennessee has a special place in my heart. I've lived there a couple of summers (to babysit my nephew and niece) and made some great childhood memories there.