Call it Chicken Salad

I feel like my heart is a throat lozenge, residing just beneath my tonsils and keeping the back of my tongue numb. I can feel her presence, ensuring my larynx won’t cause me any pain and blocking my vocal chords from doing anything detrimental, such as taking it all back – the leaving of the job, the start of the project.

Don’t get me wrong – I am monumentally excited for what’s to come. Like, literally monumentally excited. I could grab a chisel and whatever matter artists use to create sculptures and build a totem pole sixteen feet high and it still wouldn’t come close to encapsulating my level of “jazzed up”. I’m jittery and anxious and seriously ready to get moving and shaking and dating. And to torture Megan with my grandma-style driving and morning habit of making up songs about the day. But there’s certainly part of me that can’t help but wonder if I’m a tad bonkers for giving up a job and becoming transient for an extended period of time.

Call it the quarter-life crisis (so what if I’m thirty – I’m definitely planning on living to a hundred and twenty). Call it a desperate need to affirm life. Call it a desire for something besides what is expected. Call it a deep want to understand people. Heck, call it chicken salad. Whatever it is, it’s making me anxious for the transition portion to be over and the dating to begin. It feels like every day that we’re not on the road, having a life, we are that much closer to staying put and standing still.

Being in the eye of a transition hurricane is weird. I’d have thought everything would happen around me, instead of happen with me. But I was plum wrong. We’re in the trenches of planning, every last one of us working side jobs to make money and throwing ourselves into getting on the road with every spare second. And instead of standing still, I’m moving like those hurricane winds swirling around me. Not bad.