just by folding a map

for the last year and a half, this blog has been a refuge to spill about things in life that confuse, perplex, astound, amaze and impress me. i am continuously surprised at the random people that tell me they read these ramblings, much less when i hear they feel where i am coming from. i am hoping that this next string of thoughts finds you either on my same page, or with the ability to leave a comment that says, "steph, i love you, but you're crazy."
perhaps, it will leave you thinking both, which i am perfectly content with.

In one of the first Death Cab songs I ever fell in love with, Ben Gibbard expresses, "So, this is the new year.

And I don't feel any different. 

The clanking of crystal, explosions off in the distance. 

So, this is the new year. 

And I have no resolutions. 

It's selfish, I panic from problems with easy solutions...

I wish the world was flat like the old days, 

so that I could travel just by folding a map. 

No more airplanes or speedways, 

there'd be no distance that could hold us back. 

There'd be no distance that could hold us back."

Since I boarded the plane to come back to Spain, I cannot shake this feeling that I have been so strictly forced to choose. I hate that I have to choose HERE or THERE. That I am incapable of doing a decent job of reconciling both worlds that are each so important to me, so dear to my heart, so ME. Unable to clear these thoughts from my head, all day at work today (which happened to be particularly frustrating as luck would have it) all I could think was, "what the fuck am I doing here?!" I feel that everything I am doing here is wrong. Not that me actually being here is wrong, but that what I am actually DOING here is wrong.
My priorities are so absurdly out of line.
As Dave would say it, "what I want is what I've not got and what I need is all around me." What I want to be spending time on is not how I am actually spending my time at all, whatsoever. What I want to be learning, seeing, doing is what always seems to get the back burner. This is where the "problems with easy solutions" line comes into play. Well then, I think to myself, I will re-prioritize. I will re-invent this side of my life. I will RESOLVE to get things in order. I will think about how i WANT to spend my day and spend it THAT way. But it's not so easy. I have committed to things, I have made promises, I have tied myself down and I have found that this free bird has actually become acutely aware of the cage she built. Even if that cage is just until July.
I am confident this feeling will be shaken when I have settled back into my routine and I am not on hyper-sensitive mode to the strangeness of things here, the bizarreness of a grueling job i never saw myself having, the inability to see how this is relevant to training i want or need and that my entire mentality is different. but for a girl who appreciates vulnerability and has promised to be a messenger of a variety of emotions and topics, this is one of those posts that's just not quite as colorful as the others.