Blogging...

I've been reading the blogs of some of my cousins and other friends for some time now. I think my cousin Sarah has the best idea for blogging. She uses it as a tool for herself and others-- journaling for herself and keeping friends and family up-to-date on her life. I haven't been doing a very good job of journaling lately. It's frustrating. I'd like to, but things have been so crazy lately that sitting down and writing out some thoughts just makes me exponentially more tired. I'd like to remember this period in my life. I mean really remember it. I'm at such an exciting, scary, you fill in the blank juncture in my life that not writing about it seems wrong.

I am beginning my 3rd month of living in Washington. I'm 9 months away from reaching my goal: residency. My boyfriend's dad thinks the hoops I have to jump through are insane, and he tells me this frequently when I see him. "Are you a resident yet," he'll ask me. And each time I look at him with what I hope is an exasperated look and say, "Not yet. Next September." But the more I think about things--even as I write them-- the more I realize that my goal isn't just residency. I want to create a life here. Can you really place a timeline on creating a life? For so many years now, I haven't been able to choose the path that I want to take. I get to choose that now. It's scary and awful and wonderful all at the same time. There are so many ways that I could go. I think back to Junior year in High School and Robert Frost's poem "The Road Not Taken."

A while ago, I wrote reasons for breaking out on my own...they are now posted on the back of my door. I look at them often and hope that they will bring me strength. And they do. Sometimes it takes time, though. But I'm finding that every time I have a difficult time taking the next steps in my world, there's someone there to catch me or to help me find it within myself to take that next step. I may not have everything right now, but what I do have, I have much of--love, friends, family, strength, support, laughter, fight. Maybe the intangible things really are that much more important in this life.

I think it's apt to end this blog with two pictures and Frost's poem.

THE ROAD NOT TAKEN by Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

The first is of Dash and I. The second is of my parents and I- taken about 6 months ago.