“I'm not at all sure what's going on right now.” I think this ALL DAY about pretty much everything. I have doubts about what's okay to do and what's not. When it's okay to say what I'm thinking and when to shut the heck up (which has never been my forte and thus occupies an overwhelming part of my brain activity). Even stuff like...do I ask for house keys tonight or can I make it back by 9:30 and should I ask one of the guys to walk me back? Are my friends at home upset because I can't communicate like before? I am definitely not in Kansas anymore and it accordingly feels uncomfortable sometimes. I second guess a lot of things that I do now, which I would posit is very different than my behavior in the U.S.
Except swearing in. Even though my recent exposure to the real Peace Corps Costa Rica lifestyle was comparatively intimidating to life in my training community, I definitely have no doubts that this is something I've gotta do. I went to Guanacaste this weekend to stay with a current PCV who is approaching the end of her service. At first, it freaked me the hell out to think of everything that she's accomplished – not just projects, but building relationships and making her community her home. And I guess it freaked me out because throughout the past couple months I've tried not to think of my service in terms of “two years” and here I am visiting with someone who's at the end of the official in-country process while I'm just at the beginning. She told me at one point that you can't think of it as two solid years, that there has to be divisions that you make in your mind. But I didn't wrap my mind around what she was saying in that particular moment. So yeah, she probably got a weird vibe from me because the whole weekend it was crashing in on my head like waves breaking on a beach what “two years” really means.
I wouldn't want the world to be anything less than surprisingly dynamic. So for two years, I expect that things at home keep changing and that I keep changing as well. I'll come back a different person to a situation that is, for good reasons, different than what it was when I left. I won't list all that this entails, you can use your imagination. My wild imagination is exactly why I got so freaked out. And thus this all became another thing that I added to my long list of things to worry about.
But then I got back to my training community. I got a shower and I got some of my perspective back. I remembered what my volunteer told me. I thought about my goals and the reasons why I want to be here. “Missing stuff at home” was not on the list of reasons why I applied to Peace Corps. So why was I so worried about it? Instead of thinking of this as two years out of my real life – as I had begun to do this past weekend – I re-framed my thoughts to reflect again why I'm so excited about Peace Corps: These are going to be two years that will be more real than most other things I'll ever experience in my life.
It's really hard for me to second guess swearing in as a volunteer when I think about it like that.
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