Unexpected Feelings

I've spent the past three months counting down the days until I move to New York. I did not have the "best summer of my whole life" as many of my classmates claim to have had this summer. I haven't even enjoyed the hot South Florida summer weather that I usually so revere. All I could think about was getting out. I've been trapped here with so many memories I long to move on from and a personality so consumed with paranoia and anxieties that it hardly seems to function anymore.

But now, eight days away from my flight from Palm Beach to LaGuardia, I find myself scared to fucking death. Of what? I'm not entirely sure. Does it freak me out that I have no feeling towards the fact that I will never see the majority of high school friends ever again? Am I some sort of sociopath for not crying when my best friend of ten years began her eight hour drive up the state to her new home today? I'm so consumed with the life inside my head--the life away from Florida and away from people I know--that I seem to have detached from everything here that I once felt so strongly for.

I look at these other girls going to my school next year who have dreams of med school and law school; who are already signed up for advanced classes and have schedules filled with classes that have long, complicated, and unpronounceable names. I am taking intro to drawing. I am taking a class about love. A class about women. A class about art. I have aspirations of writing a screenplay about a man obsessed with Ricky Martin. Are those classes and aspirations worth going into debt over? I work hard academically so that some day when I'm famous I can say that not only am I ridiculously talented but also quite smart--just look at the colleges I was accepted to. I'm so sarcastic that I'm not sure what I really want and what is just another joke.

I was excited to leave, still am excited to leave, because I can start over. I often find myself having a hard time socially. I hardly ever go out and in the past five months or so it seems as though I have lost touch with a lot of people that I used to hang out with. When I make myself go out I spend the whole time leading up to the event wishing I had xanax to control my nerves. And, unless there is alcohol, those feelings don't generally go away once I get to wherever I am going. I've promised myself to become more outgoing, more talkative when meeting new people, less trapped inside my head. But what if that doesn't happen? What if I can't keep up with the new people I meet? What if depression sets in and stays forever this time? What if I never leave my dorm?

I used to want to be Fiona Apple--pouring my well written feelings into heart wrenching piano pop. But where did those feelings go? I've been the self-loathing, self-mutilating stereotypical angsty teen--someone I was sure I grew out of. But with situations like this--a new life looming ahead of me--I feel myself dwindling into that insecure little girl that age, hormones, confusion, love, and absence of love turned me into. Perhaps what draws back such feelings is the idea that I'm leaving them all behind. My bedroom has seen every pivotal moment of my teenage life. It holds secrets I have yet to even admit to myself. My window alone knows the cause of the majority of my mental instabilities from the past three years. It let the "love of my life" in and out every time she was in town. It brought her the night my grandfather died; it brought her in the rain, when we were happy, when were fighting, when we were over, when we were back together. I'm leaving that window in eight days and I thought I would be happy about it. But right now, I am scared.