If I am paralyzed by beginnings, then there is not a word strong enough to describe how I feel about the second step.
The second step indicates the direction, path, continual motion of everything else. Its so easy to correct course after one, two three, four steps…
If I think about it. A mile is a good basis for distance. If I've gotten a mile away from something, I am not too far away, I can walk it, and it's only taken 20 or so minutes out of my day.
There's approximately 2,000 steps in a mile. And if I needed to get back to my life, a mile seems a short ways to walk back. So there are 2,000 decisions and moves and actions that I can take almost no consequence; a mile is an easy distance when you're 23 years old.
This is a labored metaphor I know. But asides from moving from Providence to Boston and my work… I can't think of something in my life that I could maybe say I've made 2,000 conscious decisions about. I create goals for self improvement and I create phases for how to redecorate my apartment, but actions I take in the privacy of my own home feel almost like cheating.
I'm terrified of becoming the completely internal being that defines suburban living, who's involvement in greater life is defined by neighborhood complaints, PTA feuds, and surface level interactions. I lived to go to school for most of my life until this point, and I find myself grasping at ways to define and hone who I am. It is hard to explain the feeling that although you know your life is just beginning, you have no experience with the training wheels you wish you could be taking off right about now. So here I am, riding around the block-- over and over and over again-- each turn a little more confident.
But the question still remains: Where I will go once I shed the extra two wheels?