Vancouver to Australia

I must admit today I am writing with a great deal of emotions inside of me. I'm excited, nervous, anxious, and very sad.

For those of you that don't know, I was hired with a cruise company that will be taking me to Australia for 6 months to work with their cruise line. Exciting stuff!!!  I'm a very loud, boisterous person with a really open & enthusiastic personality. I'm "Entertainment Staff" which essentially means I'm going to be getting paid to be myself while travelling through the South Pacific. Clearly from that alone you can tell where the excitement is coming in.

Nervous? I'm nearly 23, and this will actually be my first time away from home for this amount of time.  Through my involvement with cadets, the longest I've been away from home is 7 weeks - the furthest being the neighbouring province to mine.  Not far. Clearly I'm very nervous to be "on my own" for the very first time on the other side of the friggin world.

Anxious.. for essentially the same reasons as the nerves. But when you have an anxiety problem, it's hard to properly explain. I think it's all the "what if" thoughts going through my mind at high velocity...

The saddness... I'm actually sitting here shaking & crying while I try to write this. My family & my friends are being incredibly supportive of my decision to go away & get paid to travel. They've always been very supportive of everything that I've wanted to do.  Leaving that support base is really challenging for me because of how amazing the people in my life are. There are people in my life that I am going to have an extremely hard time leaving.

My parents are the #1 people that I really don't want to leave. We're actually a very close-knit family & I'm not entirely sure that I'm going to be able to handle being that far away from them for 6 months and having very little opportunity to contact them.  They always give me amazing advice & I can talk to them about virtually anything... it's just going to be tough not to get to hug my parents for six months.

My best friends... most specifically my two L's.

Gosh, one of them has been there since the first day of kindergarten. She is in every possible way my sister... I actually have no words for how hard it's going to be to NOT be able to talk to her whenever I want to. It's interesting, she's literally about 4 or 5 blocks away from me - 10min walk (uphill) if that. But how many times do we actually get to see each other? Not very often. Blame it on mis-matched schedules or whatever, but the fact is oh how much did I take it for granted that she's always been THAT close.  I swear I'm not trying to be overly dramatic with everything, I'm just SUPER emotional and kinda kicking my own ass for not bothering to put a little more effort into the friendship. It's fantastic that we can go a long amount of time without speaking & reconnect like absolutely no time has passed... but that doesn't make it okay. Ugh. Emotions. Either way, this is my sister and I love her to death & then some...

Then of course my "other L" that I love to death as well. The person I'm typically always getting into trouble with, talking into things, talking out of things, & generally just having a grand old time with. I'm really not entirely positive how I'm supposed to get through 6 months without EITHER of my girls... it seems like a total impossibility.  I'm also noticing right now that in both of the photos here I'm highly intoxicated... and I'm givig basically the exact same hug. These photos are also 2 years apart from each other... apparently my drunken love for people stays the same... woot.

I've got a ton of other friends here that I really don't want to leave... but honestly I think these are the two that it's going to kill me the most to leave. It doesn't mean I love my other friends any less, it just means that these are the two I see most often & these are the two that are most like family to me.

Lastly, leaving my boyfriend J- is actually going to be really tough. We talked about it last night, and we've determined the smart thing is to break up when I'm gone. I just don't see how we can be in a functioning relationship when I'll be on the other side of the world for 6 months, with very little time to communicate with each other. I'm huge on communication in a relationship so it just doesn't seem smart. That, and I don't think I could emotionally handle not getting to see him.  We kinda fell into a "routine" with each other. We see each other nearly every day, and we talked to each other ALL the time, EVERY day.  I know it sounds clingy, but truly it's not. We've also only been together for a month. Known him for almost 5 years though so it's not like this overly new. I don't know. Part of me thinks breaking up is the right idea, and the other part of me is damn near kicking myself for being so "willing" to let him go this "easily."  Quotations are there because I'm really not all that willing and I really don't find it all that easy to do.  Uggh!! I don't even have a photo of the two of us together!!!!!!!!  I'm finding it increasingly difficult to listen to "Love Song" by Adele, STRICTLY because of these lyrics...

"However far away, I will always love you. However long I stay, I will always love you."

Fitting, isn't it...

So thats my rant. Stupid emotions. Seriously.... *sigh*