Suck By Association?

Emotional weather forecast for today: anxious and uncertain with patches of peace and tranquility. Internal squalls of debate and doubt with breakthroughs of clarity. When in motion today, be wary of high turbulence in areas of low ceilings.

I’m making headway.

Last night, while moving through some more of this very interesting internal weather, I ran across something. It’s thirty years old and subtly influential. I found myself saying, “…and the last time I gave up everything I knew and moved, it sucked.”

Well, of course it sucked. I got married and left home young. Really young. Fifteen. Shortly after I got myself into some wedlock, I moved. At first, it was only halfway across the country, to Colorado where children in Halloween costumes were making snowmen. I was horrified, and cold. A year later, it was the rest of the way across, to Virginia. I was horrified for different reasons, and I was hot and overhumidified. I didn’t know anyone, I’d never lived anywhere but California, all my family and my familiar stuff was gone, gone gone. That hellish phase lasted for two years. I’d never had to move in the world as an adult before, and I had not one iota of a thought about a clue about anything in life. I was miserable.

I didn’t realize I was still operating within that vintage misery, until I heard myself say the thing about last time and the suckage.

Sure, it sucked. I was basically a smartass teenager, using marriage in order to run away from what I didn’t like at home. I had no idea how to be in the world. I learned a lot about how I didn’t want to be in the world.

The similarity this situation bears to “the first time I did this” is actually minimal. I’m moving. That’s about it. I’m thirty years away from being a smartass teen. I’m not running from anything; I’m moving myself steadily, consciously towards something that matters a great deal to me. I have something of a feel for how the world moves, now, and a much better idea about how I desire to move through it. I’m not the same person I was then. The situation’s not the same. I’m leaving my home base to go somewhere else: that’s really where the resemblance between then and now ends.

And yet, I still have it in my head that “the last time I did this, it sucked.” That doesn’t make a lot of sense, really, considering that what I’m about to do (make conscious changes in order to pursue my dreams) is not what I did thirty years ago. There is no “last time I did this” because I’ve not previously done it. But damned if my saboteur isn’t trying to tell me it’s the same.

It isn’t. There’s a big difference between escape and adventure. Last time: escape. This time: adventure. It is not going to be all suck. There will be some suck, as it is moving, and moving, in general, sucks. But default suckage by association? Nah. That, I can leave behind.