how different am i?
i dont know. tell me.
there's this overwhelming inner sense of capability and hope.
i actually listen to and trust myself in what i say and think.
challenges excite me.
overall, i feel a lack of the kind of fear to act that would have gripped me before brazil.
even my host mother thought i was quite different from the period she finally met me to my final days there.
brazil taught me that faith that the world works out is crucial.
nobody is the center of it, and everything works out, somehow.
which ive been trying to apply. to live in the moment. to stop trying to plan and control anything.
which leads to happiness and defeats, for sure.
i want motion. speed. change. nothing fixed. up in the air. friction.
fears are just barriers set up for us to push them down.
somebody can show us the way, but its our job to plow through them.
in a way im grateful to SIT for being so disorganized.
it made us do everything ourselves.
initiative.
and its helped me to find the independence i wanted. the strength i knew was in there.
for the first time in so long i feel i can do anything.
not everything. just, anything.
there's this wonderful little quote at the end of Italo Calvinho's Baron in the Trees:
"only by being so frankly himself as he was till his death could he give something to all"
its something i quarrel with on my return home.
ive always found myself, on return from such things as this, coming back refreshed, renewed.
and then slowly, it slips away as i find myself slipping to be the way people imagined i was.
i vowed after the last time to not let that happen.
and stubbornly, am sticking to myself, now actually having a sense of who/what that means and is.
how do you stay to yourself while still reaching out to the people you care about?
and what if that is too late?
i made wonderful friends in brazil. really wonderful. who i know i will keep in touch with,
and we will always share the connection of the giant rite of passage that was the semester.
but whats the worth if you end up losing the same connections with others?
or really, how do you reconcile the two worlds?

merry christmas and happy holidays.