Freedom Reconsidered

First, to a friend: My dear girl, that was a very sweet post-- thank you :) I didn't realise I sounded so terrifyingly miserable, actually... I'm suspecting that it's partly your sympathetic frame of perception that lets my melodramatic tantrum come across as woefully tragic. Don't worry lar, I am quite incapable of such depression. I think.

Anyhow. There are a million answers to Why I Cannot Go On A Grad Trip, and support so solid that it would be unreasonable for me to raise any objection. Or so it seems, from the adult point of view -shrugs- Perhaps it doesn't really matter.

I don't have a real answer to why I should go to Europe--aside from this: I want to know if I could exist as a separate, independent, real being, in a wholly different space where I'm no longer dictated by another's wants, expectations and beliefs.

But I've existed so long this way that I am beginning to doubt my own existence beyond that. One day, some day, perhaps, I may be flung into absolute adult freedom (freedom?) unbidden. I wonder if that exists. And I wonder if I will die of shock.

I am--perhaps cowardly so--conditioned and content with living in this little pre-defined space, for as long as I have ever known. While all around me the vast unknown lies in wait for the single moment I shall be thrown unprepared into its wild, harsh unpredictability.

Sigh.