I was looking through the previous entries and I realized that I haven’t yet spoken about the day I left home to come to Nanjing. The funny part about it is that I’m not sure where to begin with that one. Yes, I suppose I could talk about waking up at 4 in the morning to get ready to go to the airport. I really hated that morning. I hated the night before, I hated the week before, I hated the month before…so that’s why starting at the beginning of the immediate journey would be false and dishonest. The story doesn’t begin when I got to the airport, but it would really begin months prior to the idea of China even got into my head. I actually think that the story begins…and leads up to the same point: Running Away.
After graduating, it hit me that I needed to figure out what I wanted to do with my life…and pretty quickly seeing as how I was running out of money and I couldn’t perpetually stay in undergrad. I had originally planned to go to law school straight out of college, but as the time grew closer and closer, I kept putting the decision off until I ‘decided’ to wait a year for law school. I place the quotes around that word because I wonder how much of it was a well-grounded decision as opposed to the fact that I had simply missed the filing deadline.
In fact, I wonder how much of my life since graduating college has been decided by indecision and actively avoiding situations. In the fall I got a job at a law firm in D.C. saying that I needed work experience at a firm before law school. And while that’s certainly a valid and real reason why to put off school for a year…it wasn’t the honest one. It was secondary and, ultimately, nothing more than a lucky confluence of events coming together and giving off the appearance of a well-thought out plan. Honestly, I’m convinced that this is the story of my life. After working at the firm for a year, the time to apply came up again. And again, I never decisively acted. It was not so much my deciding not to apply, as much as it was just never getting around to applying. Always putting it off. Time and time again.
The entire process, from LSAT classes, to my own studying, to preparing an essay, to getting recommendations…everything was reluctant and half-assed. Afraid of both success and failure, resulting in nothing to show for anything tried.
Why am I in China? Because I needed an excuse to run away and avoid more decisions that I am too afraid to take. Decisions involving school, decisions involving my life in general and decisions involving myself and Alicson. I was (am?) afraid to face reality, consequences and decisions…and so I went to the other side of the world.
There is a lot to be said about making a decision and staying committed and seeing it through.
I don’t know if I have ever done that. I’ve always found ways to get out of it, or reasons why the rules – either self-imposed or imposed by others – do not apply to me when I don’t want them to apply. My flexibility has left me without anything of my own to hold on to. Just excuses and justifications.
This story began with running away from law school and that is where I still am tonight. I was not ready for law school…that’s not true. I don’t even know that much because I’ve avoided law school. In avoiding it, I finally ran out of excuses and so I had nothing to do in the spring and fall. I am here because I was too scared to move forward.