Stay up with Me

Oh, dear reader, on a night like this, I can only turn to you. Only you understand me. It’s the night before my first day of class at USC, and I’m so nervous I can’t sleep. Truth be told, I have some cause: my stupid financial aid STILL hasn’t worked its kinks out, and I can’t get on the Cinematic Arts Community web page due to some stupid technical snaffoo that I can’t have addressed on a Sunday night.

But that stuff’s not really why I’m still awake. You know how it is, guys and girls, sometimes the excitement of something new is overwhelming. While stagnating in routine appeals very little to me, new things also carry a kind of amorphous terror which I have dealt with my whole life. I remember my brother, somewhere around sixteen years old, sitting on an idling moped in our driveway, staring at me with expaserated eyes.

“If you’d just get on it, I know you’ll love it!”

Wide-eyed, chewing on my bottom lip, I would stand there frozen and stall.

“Nothing bad is going to happen!”

I shook my head at him, because the possibility of being hurt was not what stayed my hand, nor has it ever been. Newness itself just screws with me, it forces me out of my comfort zone. Truth be told, it’s in exactly these situations, where I stop being comfortable, that I always find the best parts of myself. But I’ll never really enjoy new things, they are my cross to bear. I think the fact that I got married right out of college and moved across the country definitively proves that this fear is in control, that my emotions answer to me and not the other way around, but little things like not being able to sleep still slip through my fingers sometimes.

I know God likes me exactly where I am right now: uncertain. It’s here where He knows I have to trust Him, have to pay more attention, have to push myself. But as Mother Teresa said, sometimes I wish He didn’t trust me so much.

I want few things more than to be a student at USC, and being a little fried the night before doesn’t change that, but still…

It’s scary. This is the beginning of my life. What happens next, dear reader? What happens next?