I Survived Week One

WOW.

I love being in the adult world. I love freedom, and I love the smell and taste of my morning coffee while I sit in traffic and drive to work. It just astounds me how much my life is currently upside down compared to what it was about two weeks ago. Yes, it was only last week that I graduated high school, but it was also a change for a new life, in a new world.

I have grown so comfortable in the care of my mother and relying on her for my rides and schedules from day to day, and this week was intense in the situation that my mother has been in Maryland for the week at school and I was given the car to take care of myself for the week, including my start at my first job and internship. It was so incredible. It was like a scene from Freaky Friday without the crazy earthquake creating fortune cookie at a tacky chinese restaurant or anything. Instead, it was a simple parting of ways between my mother and I in reverse directions.

I loved the feeling of driving to work in the morning on my own, which is an hour of "me time", even if there was horrible traffic. I loved becoming a part of the office, and gaining my own desk out of the three total working desks. It was amazing to learn how to take site measurements for conceptual projects, learn the math to find topographical grading, and then to learn the ways of the architectural process of creating the design: from sketch, to vectorworks, to photoshop, and then to sketchup. It's just perfect because I know I'm gaining an edge for my entrance to school in the fall. I just cannot wait to enter.

This brings me to another point. 

I cannot believe that I am actually joining into a new world. This is much different from my new job because my boss is my mother's friend, and pottery student, I'm only a 3 minute drive from my mother's work, and I continue to visit her workplace after I'm finished with work so I can talk to familiar people. For me to be going to a school FIVE hours away from home is a rather large deal. I continue to worry about what might happen, but most of all, I'm afraid of what I'll miss back home. I'm not saying that I'll be absolutely homesick, but I know that it will hurt me not to know everything that's going on back home, and seeing people as normally as I do. For example, I feel so awkward talking about where I'm going to school because I'm going to a very high ranking school while the majority of my friends are going to the state school that I turned down for myself. I feel like I'm rude whenever I have to explain to someone new that I am going to a different school from everyone else, and yes, I won't know anyone else from the area other than an old lab partner from a year before, who is a year ahead of me, and who my friend's aren't really fond of. I hate the feeling that I'm being rude, annoying, or obnoxious, and I hate thinking that someone has a negative thought of me just because of my choices. It's not that I am embarrassed by my choice of school, but I have learned that people around me frown upon my difference, and so I try not to become the foreign object of conversation.

I'm not saying that I am conforming, or that I am falling under peer pressure of any sort, but that sometimes I find that certain friends are not the ones to talk about certain things to. I find that some of my friends are jealous because I am going to my number one school while they got turned down. I also find that some of my friends don't understand my motive to experience every bit of the world and to try different likes and tastes. It's hard because I live in a small town where the people frown upon internet communication unless it's with someone you already know. So I find it hard to talk to my friends about my love for diggnation or twitter because they just don't get it. They're not close-minded, but they have different ideas for enjoyment.

So I guess what I'm trying to say is that I am too excited for my new life, but I'm scared of the people I am leaving and the life I am leaving because I'm starting to actually love it and very comfortable with it after a long time of hating it, and I just don't want to lose what I have. I don't want to lose some of my greatest friends because of our differences, and soon our different locations. I truly do feel an honor when someone likes me and enjoys my company as so theirs, so to know that I am going to be far from people who I trust, I know it's going to be hard.

Today I went to two graduation parties and it was there that I started out having a ball and being a party animal, but by the end of the evening, I was seeing how everyone had their differences and how I felt really outcasted at one point because of my dislike of a three hour long game of sexual innuendos that soon were all directed at me. I can take it. It's not bullying. It's only a playful banter between friends, but I realized that huge difference that I had with my friends and I didn't know who they were and was unfamiliar with "this side of them" and it scared me to death. Was this how it was going to be in the future? Are we going to see each other, share a hug, and then only be able to reminisce because we have nothing in common in our likes to share a conversation about with offending someone? It feels so hard to know this parting is occurring, and with some people I don't mind it, but truthfully, it scares me because I know that I am changing and will change even more over the years and fear that in turn I will not be liked anymore, or respected as I am now.

Call me paranoid. I know I am. I am always scared.