To Whoever Invented The Bus System: Try Again

For most of my life, I have existed inside a comfort zone. This is not a brag, but a way for me to say that it takes a lot for me to get ruffled in situations. I inherited both my father’s patience and my mother’s aggressiveness, making me an interesting person that only reacts to things when they truly matter to me. When I am inside my comfort zone, I am in control of my interactions. I am...comfortable.

I am not in this place right now.

Something that I have discovered, is that I am not funny in French. It shouldn’t bother me as much as it does, but it has shaken me to my core that I am not able to get everyone to like me based purely on my obvious charm and quick wit. They have to actually get to know me, understand my personality. It is needless to say that I will not have as many French friends as I do American ones.

I also got lost the other day.

For the first time in a long time, as in since when I was ten at DisneyWorld, I was panicked and was in a place where I had no experience and barely any service and just desperately wanted to get to my house. It was after I had gone to a pub downtown with some new friends of mine, and I left with one of them to find the bus we both take. You can only imagine two girls speaking English in heavy southern accents and looking at a paper map like it was 1994, trying to figure out why there are more than three buses, and why their stops disappear at night. Thankfully, two girls came down from Heaven and told us to follow them on the bus and they’d show us our connections (I’ve also noticed that any French person will refuse to speak French to me if they hear me speak English, even if I speak French to them, even when they obviously haven’t spoken English since the 11th grade. If there are any French people reading this, why?). This caused me to part ways with my friend, and as I was celebrating my victory by texting my family about my evening, I missed my stop. I asked the bus driver what to do, and he told me to wait for another bus.

Any trait my father gave me was gone by this conversation.

I said thank you, and jumped off the bus to hurry to yet another stop, only to reach it and think to myself, “You know what? I’m not going to be disappointed again.” So, I started walking. I’m not sure how long exactly it was that I walked, but I know that it was long enough for me to truly reflect on my day and life in general while I switched my stare from the street to the online GPS. This is what I thought about.

If you are in your comfort zone for too long, you may start to feel like it is because you wouldn’t be okay anywhere else. I have felt this way many times, specifically about travelling. When I was a freshman in college and briefly considered giving up on school and working at my old job full-time, all I could think was how when I considered it, I could see my life like a roadmap. I could see very clearly that I could just get a job that I sort of kind of like, write on the side, and stay in Austin forever, and through that, everything would fall into place. I could picture with what I will assume to be incredible accuracy what I will be doing forever. There would be no surprises. Good, I almost thought. I don’t like surprises. 

But in order for me to consider staying in the place that I’ve known for my entire life, I had to compromise on the one thing that I have known without a doubt that I wanted to do: get out of Austin. I’m not saying this maliciously, simply as a fact that I want to live somewhere else. I am drawn to the faraway and hard-to-reach. In order for me to finally feel capable, I would have to shrink the part of me that yearns for the unknown.

Luckily, I came to my senses rather quickly, and changed my major, and now I am on another continent. Things are looking up. But I was thinking about how scared I was before I left, of being in a vulnerable position somewhere new, like I don’t know, getting lost in a foreign city alone at night. I would get terrified of it, I would feel it in my stomach all the way up to my throat, that same kind of fear you get in nightmares when you just know something’s waiting for you in the dark. The uncertainty can eat you alive if you don’t know how to poison it with optimism. 

Of course, we know the end of this particular story. I got on the plane. I was lost for a little while, but I survived. I made it home alive and in time for dinner. Things have a way of looking up.

But I still think, sometimes, of what would have happened if I had let the fear win, if I didn’t feel God spurring me on a twisty path with a built-in laugh track. I would be comfortable, for sure. I would not be myself. I actually wrote something else on this. This is going to go in one of my books, but you get a special sneak peek since I love y’all so much. It goes like this:

“if i were to ignore the thing that is making a home in my heart

if i were to pretend that that thing does not exist

that i can be happier if i just ignored it

and lived my life

hoping that an easier dream will come to me at night

i don’t know what would happen.

that’s a lie

i do know what would happen

but it is a thing i have never allowed myself to consider 

something so horrific that i don’t know if i could say it aloud

the idea of being just happy enough,

to get by.”

I am the last person who could tell you where I am going, but I would much rather regret the things I did than the things I didn’t do. Maybe that’s a mistake, but I suppose only time will tell.