Sliding in softly

I'm starting this blog back up again. Who knows how long it will last. I reached a point last year when I stopped wanting to spill out everything that was going on inside and out of me. Call it ironic for someone studying communications, but I just wanted to live life with all its pain, joy and craziness and soak it in - not talk about it. My life has been a canvas of very outgoing spots thrown upon the quieter, reflective background that has been my steady standby throughout my life. It was time to be silent for awhile.

When I think that my two years in Italy are over, I feel like a part of me was quietly removed and left behind in a place that slowly tugs and beckons for a return. I deeply, deeply, loved my time there. It was wicked hard. It could be deeply frustrating. I lived through more painful events in my life there than anything that had ever ripped my heart before. But there was the beauty that was so prevalent that you stopped noticing it after awhile because it was so much a part of life. There was that sharp, exhilarating independence in a way that I had never experienced before, where the life that I set was truly my own. Life was so much simpler there. Accomplishments may have taken a smaller scale as well, but nothing could compare to the satisfying sense of casually having a conversation in the language you had finally learned . . . of hearing an Italian tot giggle over and then repeat the words "oops" and "scrunched" that you unconsciously dropped while playing with scarves in June . . .of having favorite chapels in churches and favorite saints to visit . . . saints whom you knew were you own, because you'd unloaded buckets of tears and spilled so much ink on earnest prayers in desperate, heart-wrenching times . . . and then there was the promise of Assisi, now so far away, which holds a greater place in my heart than another other spot on this earth.

Classes were hard. Writing a Masters thesis in 2 weeks was even harder. Explaining the church's position on euthanasia in Media Training, on camera, in Italian, with a babbly teacher was tough too. But there was an ease to it . . .not always, but often there . . . that came from the routine, from the pace, and maybe from the amazing food. Being a resident stranger in a foreign country gives you a unique, semi-proactive observer status. You are there. Fact. And you are a part of it all. You don't really belong, and you know it. You observe and dip in, but you're still not it. And there was a strange security and comfort that came from that. It was ok there not to be perfect. I find that harder to remember over here.

America has processed food and high fructose corn syrup. Starbucks has nothing against an Italian cappucino. I drive my car now instead of tackling miles of road, and I lost my Rome legs, which is my greatest complaint about my homecoming. The little blessings are there too. It is good to be back in America. I missed the sense of having a grand community of people who speak your language - in more nuances than one. Perpetual academics were never my flavor, with a few deserved and lovable exceptions. I missed seeing my family, hugging my nephews and my two nieces - one of whom I didn't even meet until one month ago today. But adjusting has been hard. Harder than I thought it would be. Maybe even harder because everything will feel so normal until something in me shifts, and then I'll realize that I haven't really settled in at all.

I have a new job, doing what I always said I wanted to be doing: writing. There is something rather terrifying to that: to finally have the chance to do what you've advertised as your core for so long. It is very much putting your own self on the line, for yourself, to see what you look like after all. I never thought I'd be writing about space shuttle missions and Hubble telescopes with their kazillion technical systems, but I am. I'm there to infuse the human dimension into the technical mumbo, and that is an idea that I deeply love. I have a great set of people around me, but that hasn't mitigated yet the same feelings of dread that seep back from my work experiences pre-Rome . . . two years of feeling inadequate will wreck their share of damage on you fairly quick and tear deep scars. But I refuse to sink in. I had a dear wise friend of mine say the other day that having to walk on water was easier than walking on the ground because you know that it's impossible and your success doesn't depend on your own strength. I am walking on water now. But I know that I'm doing what I should be doing. And I'm here to do it, even if it does wrench me a bit.

I started this post because I had writer's block all day and was in agony about it. A project still awaits me tonight when I close this browser window, because the first week is all about making good impressions, is it not? But the blessings do come in the midst of it all, because somehow through spinning this all out I remembered that I can write after all . . .and that means I can let myself off the line, for just a little while.