Month-to-go blues…

Last Saturday, July 17th, was exactly a month-one! it’s true!- before my departure. Up until now, it seems as if I was focusing more on my strenuous, farm girl life of early mornings and sweaty hoeing, but now that that critical point has passed, I can feel my mind slowly shift to worries about packing, goodbyes, and airplane nightmares.

Since the exact day that I received my contact information about my host family in Tokyo, I have been emailing both my host mother and host sister nonstop – so much so that my mother believed that I was bothering them. It seems that I cannot control my excitement – to know as much as I possibly can about how I will spend my ten months there. After a long strain of emails and getting to know both of these special people, I am immensely relieved at how kind and fabulous they are! My desire to meet them increases as I read each email they send me. 🙂

But now, stress about packing consumes my brain. I worry that I won’t bring enough, will bring too little…the list goes on. Since I will not be home for a year and since Japan is a thirteen hour airplane ride away, if I would forget something special, I would have to live without it. So I am racking my brain, endlessly, it seems, to come up with every single special item I own…though, interestingly, I do not have many.

Some days, I look in the mirror and think I am too young to depart my comfortable life tucked in between special people and special scenery. I do not feel ready for the multi-million populated Tokyo, then, as I stare into my scared eyes in the mirror. Yet I have made the decision to go, and I will not let down myself as to give up on this life-long dream now that it is close enough to taste, feel, and touch…

It’s five thirty, and the guilt of not working hard enough today is building inside of me – so I will now assume my back-breaking farm work once again.