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I think i'm regaining my footing after being flung wildly on the hurricane of shifting my life to a new country. I find myself smiling as I ride my bike through the cold and dark again. Some of the pressure and angst has lifted.
I worry a bit that going back I will have developed weird habits and lost some of my old quirks. By interacting with the kids I am retroactively fixing problems that defined me as a young person. And I am losing qualities (however slight) that helped to define me as an individual. It's all silly stuff, like becoming able to eat really, really slimy food or even (gack!) tomatoes. But stuff like that... Somehow I built it up in my head that losing that meant losing something else. Qualities like not being able to cook or being sort of a flake, though not really good things, have always been something of a signature. So those things and more are being shaved away in my transition to the life of an adult.
Yet there are peeks back into the pudgy life I left behind. In just six months I will be back in the states, being cared for again, as I always have been. My struggles will be over. And I wonder what new opportunities and complaints I will find?

I only understand myself in metaphor, so perhaps if I put it this way. It's as though I am a goldfish and I have been taken from a small, familiar tank where I am regularily fed and dropped into a cove in the ocean (and let's just pretend freshwater fish can live in saltwater- this is a hard one for me to imagine otherwise). It's not completely insurmountable or deadly, but I have grown larger. I will need a larger tank. And perhaps someday the ocean.

With this realization comes an incredible surge of power, and a feeling of far-sightedness and proactivity I have never had access to. And on its fringes, a great deal of loneliness.
But I never have been very good at shaking that feeling entirely. Maybe someday I will find someone I can trust without walls again. Until then I am young and strong enough to strike out in the world alone, and find the good things waiting for me there.