Pre-Departure & Hobbits

Every day, I wake up and see the countdown widget on my phone. And every day, I am shocked and betrayed. Time marches on, without any regard for my health and sanity. We have always held each other in contempt, Time and I. Time thinks I don’t pay him the respect he deserves. And I don’t think he knows how to count. Thus we are at odds, and now he is laughing at me.

It’s not that I’m not prepared, exactly. I have had many jobs to do – paperwork to sort, things to cancel or set up, finishing half-done projects – but I have been getting them done. For each individual task, I have to keep reminding myself: “Actually, I can do this.”

Everything feels so big. But “feels” is the operative word. Me and my old buddy anxiety have been making things seem bigger than they are since my personal always. In high school, on the front of our Maths exams, my teacher used to have a dot point under all the front page information: “It’s not that hard.” If I had a hundred classes with him, I heard him say that phrase two hundred times. At least. I was notorious for believing I had the wrong answer if the working out felt a little too straight forward or simple – I always expected there to be a catch. I would overwork it, recheck it over and over, work the problem backwards.

I give the beast its power by believing it to be bigger than it is. It doesn’t have to roar- I can fill the silence with a thousand different imaginings of what it will sound like when it does. If it does. If it’s not just a mouse with its shadow projected large on a nearby wall.

In a way, it is utterly crazy that I am moving countries, to a place where I have no fluency in the language, to a job I haven’t even remotely done in years. I chose this. No one forced me into it. I sat in a class and thought “I could do that.” Which is fine in the abstract, but then you actually have to start making it happen. Sometimes I think the only explanation is that the infection I had last November ate the sensible part of my brain and it simply hasn’t grown back yet. That’s how long I’ve been working on everything for this job. Somehow, I haven’t lost my nerve yet. I have agonised, but I have always made it through. Still working the problem backwards to check my answers sometimes, even when it’s not that hard – but making it through all the same.

And now, I am just two days away from everything I have been working towards. The idea is both unreal and completely nauseating. Mental denial paired with physical dread.

But I have this old trick. Whenever I dream the beast too large, I go back to a story. Lately, it has been The Lord of the Rings. Gandalf said he chose Bilbo Baggins because he made Gandalf feel brave when he was afraid – and I thought perhaps he could do the same for me. I remind myself that life is really just a story in the end, and the hard patches are a part of every story – as a quote, often misattributed to Tolkien but actually written by Sara Ban Breathnach, goes, “It simply isn’t an adventure worth telling if there aren’t any dragons.” It’s about how you face it.

Whenever I start to lose sight of the joy and privilege of getting to go on this trip, to make this change, I stop and remind myself, “I’m going on an adventure!” And then I consider my own equivalent of a Took-bloodline and whether that compels me onwards into adventure and eccentricity. And there is nothing like having the soundtrack to epic quests and battles playing in your ears while you go about menial errands. On the cover of my latest journal read the words: “Not all who wander are lost.” The inside page reminds: “The world is not in your books and maps – it’s out there.”

Borrowed courage still gets the job done. You can expect lots more of this in my future writing. I am unapologetically nerdy so if you don’t know this already, now is the time to acclimatise to the idea.

It has been an uphill climb, and I’m still only just getting started really… but I am starting to think that maybe, actually, I can do this.

Post Script, as it were: if this post lacks logical cohesive flow, my apologies- not all who wander are lost, but my train of thought sure is.