First of Fall.

As the first sliver of fall has begun to hint itself in the early September air, I let the breeze ruffle my hair as I count the years. Fall always makes me feel nostalgic.

It's been over four years since I moved to Georgia. This place has always been many things to me. It was my first place I ever moved to when I moved away from home. It's where Wesleyan is. It's where I got into my first car accident. It's where I got my first apartment. It's where I found new places, and slowly but surely learned how to make a place feel familiar. It's where I started my first business. Where I started Grad school. Where I learned to swing dance.

Most importantly though, Georgia has become home. Not because my family is there - not because my childhood friends are there or my childhood school - not because of all my old haunts - but because I worked hard to make it that way.
Coming up to Georgia as a teenager, I used to feel like Georgia was my respite. It was my home away from home, but it was also a place where I went to get away from Florida life. From work. From school. From the world I lived in. Over the last years, I have watched as my life has transitioned gradually. My responsibility has shifted from my old home - Florida - to Georgia, as I began school, started a business, made relationships.
My professor asked us yesterday if we would be able to move back home in a heartbeat. Drop everything, and just go. Could you? Could I?

The answer is no. I couldn't. I've built my life here now. My life here is hard, and sometimes it's a burden. But there's also a sort of comfort in the responsibility and work. There's a comfort in making things happen. Checking things off a list.
Florida is where I go as the respite now. Georgia, Atlanta, is my life.

I think back at my Macon roots and all of the time I spent there getting to know myself. Macon has been voted as one of the worst places to live in the country recently! But I think a lot of people that live there understand where I'm coming from when I say it was really just home to me, with its good and its bad and its crime and sketchy parts of town but its beautiful parts too. I loved the view of Rose Hill cemetary across the Ocmulgee River. And the first site of Macon, its glimmering lights as I approach it northbound at the start of the 475 bypass. I loved Tatnall Square Park and Mercer and Wesleyan's towering brick buildings. I loved Taste and See, the specialty coffee shop downtown, and the beautiful catholic cathedral I used to go pray at (even if I'm not Catholic), and I loved the librayr perhaps more than anything. Macon is charming it many ways. Just don't go to the bad parts. To me it had been home all of the past few years, and it had been a good home. I think of the friends I made and the battles I fought. My first time buying groceries for my dorm. The first day of cold air on October 1st, 2011 - and I wore flip flops and winter clothes because I didn't have any winter shoes. I remember my first entertainment gig - balloon twisting at Eagle's Landing country club in Stockbridge. I remember late-night visits to Joe's, sipping coffee across from Mercer as I studied for Anatomy and Physiology, O-Chem, and Physics for Wesleyan. I remember Libris the library cat at Wesleyan's library. My first work study job in admissions at Wesleyan, shyly being introduced to the staff and fumbling my way around.
It was never my childhood home, but it was something perhaps even more important - my adulthood home.

As I am thinking of all of these things, I can't help but feel a sense of old. I'm not - I'm only 21 - but I've lived a lot of life for 21 years, and my journey away from home started so long ago that I feel as though I was just a kid back then. You never think at the time about how you'll look back and gawk about how far away your life from back then seems. But as you get older, you see it happen more and more. See the gaps in your knowledge, the stupid, impulsive things you did, feel as though you were stumbling in the dark in comparison to how much more insight you have now.
In many ways, I was just a kid. I was just beginning my battles with Diabetes - I was messy, overzealous about getting my prescriptions, worried and unsure of what to do. I was sad. I felt like the world was a little out to get me. How did I handle it in class? What if I got low during an exam? There was so much that I didn't know. So much more I know now (and so much I'm aware that I still don't know). I can't believe it's gone by so quickly.

Now I'm here in the 1st of my last 2 academic semesters of Mercer before going to clinic. I'm so excited I can hardly stand it, even though a slew of competencies, exams and projects face me before I go. In just a year and a half, if all goes well, I'll have my Doctorate degree. I just take it a day at a time. Slow and steady.

It's almost my 22nd birthday, and I left for Georgia when I was 17. As the air grows colder and the days until I get another year older become closer, I am thinking of all these things. The ebb and flow of life. The good, the bad, the challenges. I'm calmer about things now. I'm more sure of what I want. I go to bed earlier. I guess I'm getting older, even though it's not something I notice while it's happening. It's crazy, isn't it? This blog is literally a testimony to these last few years of my life, and growing into an adult.
I'm glad I have that testimony, too. It's how you learn. Just so much as it's for people to read, my writing is for me, too, to look back and see how life has changed.

And to look back and see how I've changed so much, too.