the beginning of the end

I’ve been plagued for weeks now by all sorts of lists and deadlines. Each time I finish a task or complete an assignment, I feel the tiniest bit of relief before an impending sense of doom swallows me entirely. I feel camaraderie with other seniors facing similar situations, but I also feel an extreme disconnect knowing that the future will take us down different paths.   

I distinctly recall frantic phone calls with my mom during my freshman year of college, when my workload or friend problem was overwhelming and scary. After listening to every last mundane detail of my situation, she would calmly ask me “Sarah, how do you eat an elephant?” to which I would exasperatedly answer “One bite at a time.”

In the past year, seven months, and one week I have had to teach myself to be my own support system rather than relying on my mom. She was my rock and roots, keeping me grounded amidst the storms. Without her, I feel like a piece of paper torn jaggedly from a notebook, loose and swirling in the wind. Things don’t make as much sense as they did with her—much like reading a book with a missing chapter: it’s possible to get to the end of the book, but it will take longer and won’t make as much sense and probably won’t be as enjoyable.

But I digress...I have two conclusions to share. The first is that I’ve had really good intentions of writing in this blog before now and the second is that I have really no idea what I’m doing with my life. I know those might seem unrelated (and/or unimportant) but in my mind, they correlate quite well.

See, the thing that kept me from writing this first blog post was all of the things in my life that remain undone and all the things that remain unknown. I have so much to do, especially in the three weeks until graduation and the six weeks until leaving for Cambodia, that writing this post kept getting pushed farther and farther down my to-do list. I also wanted to have a vision of what I wanted this blog to look like before I started. But sometimes you just need to sit yourself down and write, even when you don’t quite know the next time you’ll post or what the direction of said blog will be.

The same goes for life. I don’t know where I’m going, really, or what I’ll be doing and that is about as scary going into a dark basement by yourself (growing up, I was irrationally scared of my basement)—or maybe even a bit scarier. So every time I start to freak out about life, instead of bursting into tears or pulling out my hair, I calmly ask myself “Sarah, how do you eat an elephant?”

The answer?

With barbeque sauce, of course.

And one bite at a time.