Advice most parents would hate...

"So do put your daughter on the stage, Mrs. Worthington. She may not always make a decent living there but she will be part of an ancient and honorable mystery, and it is on the stage that she will most likely be able to find herself." 

- Robert Brustein

...but that I love.  

When the stress, rage, passion, and exhaustion is culminated during that routine - it combusts into an electrical energy that is static. Tangible. Something I feed off of like a drugged up animal. When I'm on stage, nothing else exists. Hell, even the stage beneath my feet doesn't exist. It's just movement and music that pump through my veins. I'm slicing through the spotlights but cruising between the dancers. It's everything and nothing in the same heartbeat - self-destructive in more ways than one but gives my life meaning. 

If I'm lucky, I'll continue to find that feeling either on the stage or elsewhere. That feeling when you're waiting in the wings, filling your body with the rhythm, and there is that brief second before you start - just a second and no more - that you know you're about to create magic. 

Fact.

Some of the world's most beautiful people will love you more than you could ever love yourself. You are not confident without their encouragement. You are not comfortable without their acceptance. You are not you without them. And as hard as that is to accept, it is not a fact to be feared. Because it's one of life's most attractive peculiarities - to feel such strong, natural emotions for a body external to your own.

To you, who know who you are. Thank you. All of you. I love you.

Well this is awkward.

I'm no longer in Barcelona, but I am keeping this blog. And the title. Because we all know how much of a paradise Medford is.

It seems like everyone is moving forward these days. Getting jobs, or married, or pregnant (seriously - not over the shock yet). And for some reason, I'm moving backwards. I thought I made some headway with my whole law school plan. But now, all of a sudden, people from all sides are asking me the same pointed question that makes me think they see something I don't. "Are you sure you want to go to law school? It just doesn't seem you."

What. I really thought I was done with people laughing in my face after telling them what I'm studying (special shout out to that douche at CMU), by following it up with "But I'm planning to go into law." Now all of a sudden,  the sentence might just end with "I study Philosophy and Religion"? That's terrifying.

They ask me what I would want to do if I didn't do law. And the pathetic part is - I have absolutely no idea. I am one of the few people who don't have a dream job, and I'm not sure which part of this equation is more concerning. I know what makes me happiest - dancing, writing, traveling, helping people. But do I love these things because they take me away from my life, or do I want to make them my life? Would they begin to lose their beauty as they increased their frequency?

I don't know. And ironically enough those 3 little words are the only thing I'm certain about right now. They say I'll figure it out, and everything will be okay. But having faith in the future is so much more difficult when it's an amorphous blob that you can't mold yet. It smacks you in the face every time your friend gets an amazing internship opportunity, and you don't even know what field you want to apply to. Or when your immersion in the class' conversation about Happiness is interrupted by the realization that this stimulation isn't exactly a resume builder. Or when you talk to any Indian person, and they are completely and utterly confused by you.

It's not easy, but for now I have to trust that the difficulty means I'm doing something right. That maybe I'm not supposed to lead a structured life, and that this rocky road just might be the right flavor for me.