Leaving the Old Path

I'm walking down a new path, taking one-way ticket to a place I have never really been to before. Or at least, I will. I am taking a sharp turn in my life, walking straight into new waters and I am not regretting it at all. Today was my last day of public school. Next year, I will be in a private arts school. And I still don't know what to feel about that.

I know that what I'm doing is good. I know that this place has all of the resources for me, that it is an atypical school for an atypical person. I should be feeling happy, relieved. And, in a way, I am. Yet at the same time, I am feeling something else too. Something deep and heavy inside of my chest.

I guess the thing is is that I didn't want it to be this way. I wanted things to change and to get better and to stick it out. I did. I wanted to learn how to tolerate the pain that I was feeling so deeply inside of my chest, to not have to feel the heavy weight of feeling like an outsider in a place that was supposed to make me feel safe.

But things didn't work out that way. I spent my time in a toxic places around toxic people and that only made me toxic myself. It made me bitter and it made me sad and it made me give up on my hope of ever really succeeding, of ever being accepted or being happy. Was anything in life really worth it? Was all of life just a brutal race to the top? I was alone, utterly alone, the tendrils of negative energy sapping away everything that I was. I was a flower wilting away in darkness: perhaps I was not being stomped on or regarded but I was still a neglected flower and I would still grow stunted. I tried to change, to act happy, to not let it show. I even tried to get some mental stimulation from my school mates, with mostly failure. But it didn't work.

Sure, I could have "tolerated" it. But is tolerating it really living? Should I have swallowed that monotony and forced down the bile it gave me, waiting until it strangled me? Of all of the people in my school and of all of the teachers, I have to say there was probably only one person who actually cared about me and the other students. And while that did offer me some sort of hope for a while, it wasn't enough. I hated that feeling of loneliness, of no one caring, no one seeing, everyone moving. Those four walls around me each day gripped me like a vise. I knew that I had to take myself out of that environment. I needed to start fresh because something was definitely wrong. And I'm not saying my school was the cause for all of this. I had already arrived there miserable. I had a match in my hand and school was the gasoline; it was no wonder something horrible would ignite. That was a sign that something was wrong, that something had to change. The old path became too hard to walk on; I had to try something else before I would collapse.

So no, I don't have any feelings of longing for that life. I suppose what I do have is a fear of the unknown, wondering whether I am jumping from one bad thing to an even worse one. Because I'm taking a risk. A huge risk. There's always a risk in leaving everything you know behind and instead reaching for something else. It's quite crazy if you think about but sometimes, crazy is all that I really need to make the kind of change you want.

And there's a huge leap of faith in taking risks. There's a huge chance that I'm taking, one that might end horribly. I doubt that it will but, of course, there is always going to be that chance. And I have to accept that. Things might not work out. I have to accept that things If I step out of my comfort zone, which is what I'm doing, I might be well, uncomfortable. I might get less. But if I DON'T do it, I definitely won't get MORE. And I'm an ambitious girl; I don't want to lose that ambition. I've heard that if you don't like something, you need to CHANGE it so I'm changing the aspects in my life that I don't like. I don't like the path I'm walking down so I'm walking down a new one.

Is this giving up? Quitting? I don't know. All I know is that it's what I have to do.

I'm leaving. My feet already feel better, relieved of the sores that come from walking down a path of thorns. I'll get a chance to heal. I don't know if this is quitting but it's what I have to do. I feel like I have set down my backpack of boulders at the side of the road and walking (no running) without the sharp snapping of someone behind me telling me to stop. Maybe I'll visit, look back, reach out. But for now I have to go. But for now, I must start to walk my new path.