Or, jumping when you’re afraid of heights
Ever since I can remember, I have felt a pull towards travel. It was intrinsic, instinctual: an invisible string wrapped around my heart and tugging me towards… something, someday. People say you should trust your gut feelings, and those have always been mine. My gut told me I was destined to explore the world, should I be brave enough (or, more important at the time, able) to listen.
Until the day came that I finally did listen, wanderlust had settled in for the meantime. In fact, it was at the forefront of my personality for many, many years. It grew comfortable there, made itself at home under my skin. It grew into me and I grew up with it, grew around it, grew used to it, like an extra limb that didn’t belong but still somehow felt right. That’s the problem with staying in your comfort zone: it begins to feel like the only zone. Wanderlust was comfort to me, so why do anything about it? Why change? It filled me with hope, excitement, and happiness, and I was nearly resigned to the joy of my anticipation being enough for me. Anyone who has been to a middle school dance knows that sometimes (perhaps too many times), the anticipation of a thing is even greater than the thing itself, and I got so damn comfortable with my untapped wanderlust that my brain almost tricked me into thinking things ought to stay that way forever. My brain was wrong.
It’s scary to imagine that I almost fell into my own trap, my own vicious cycle. I could have spent the rest of my life gazing out windows and doodling and creating Pinterest boards and wondering when someday would become today. And then, one day—one random, unmemorable day—I woke up and found that to my horror, I was capable, and potentially had been capable for quite a while. The problem was the second piece… the courage. It was on that unremarkable day that I decided to be remarkable. All I needed to do was have enough daring to say yes, to take the plunge, to leap out of my comfort zone. That’s all the scariness of it, really, the jump. After you jump, the rest is already in motion, out of your hands, and you have no choice but to enjoy the view and see where it takes you. So I woke up one day and jumped. And I can never go back to who I was before.