the battle i don't want to fight.

where am i?

caught in the middle.

last week i was sitting on my bus on my way to work after getting a smoothie with my quick friend damian who was on his way out of chicago and on his way to the east coast and i was thinking...

~this is my brain~

damian= 12 months of traveling the world, on his way to the east coast for the last 30 days of his trip.

me= on my way to an internship.

and then it hit me!

my internship is realism right?
and my hostel is idealism...people traveling the world learning about culture, themselves and how the american dollar works is what my hostel is filled with, and i am the person going back and forth from the world i love to the world i hate.
i go to work and do a small part of what i want to do with my life but i hate the redundancy of it all.
i go to the hostel and meet new people every three days who have stories that would blow your mind. i make connections and have learned if i ever want to communicate with them ever again to get both their first name and last name.
one person i kinda broke the cardinal rule of hostels with, i will fret about for months.

i really don't want to go back to school not because i don't like school, i love my classes, there are just some people i don't really want to go back to.
i know i'm only here for four weeks, but i've actually grown a lot or in a way backtracked in this short time and going 'home' is going to be an interesting transition because people know me as this one type of emily and i've realized the people who 'know me better than i know myself,' actually only know what i show them, so it will be hard going back and figuring out who my real friends are.
when i go back i will not be the same person. there is such a persona of me that how i will act will throw people off and i've been thinking about it a lot and i am an outsider in manhattan and the friends i think i had aren't really my friends.
i'm still contemplating this epiphany, so just give me some time to figure it out and think it through. I guess i am just tired of starting over in places i have already been in for years at a time.
when i am here at my hostel, i am this completely different person that people actually enjoy having around. i am not an annoyance, a burden, the person who never goes away, etc.
they don't know anything about me and i can be real with them if i choose, and if they do find stuff out about me, they don't care, they don't judge, they love me anyway.
i can just be me and i haven't been able to just be me in a really longtime, i have forgotten who that is.
i am so afraid of how people will react...people being; who know my life story.
i am the person at the hostel that will be there at the end of the day to hear about their adventures. i am the american doing something completely 'unconventional' to what everyone else here is doing and it fascinates them.
when i go 'home', i will no longer be playing this role.
so, when i go 'home', it will be realism all the time, i won't be able to escape to the idealistic world i prefer.
i'm still jaded emily, but i can't keep doing what i'm doing at school.
i don't know what that is necessarily, but i don't like it and i don't really enjoy the people i have surrounded myself with. when i am with them there are doubts and esteem issues and thoughts i shouldn't be having.
i like who i am here and i plan on staying that way when i go back to school, because as far as i'm concerned, that is all kansas is to me...where i go to school. it is not my home.