Anyone care to make a suggestion?

I usually try to keep this blog just as a "work only" space, without involving my life, but all will make sense in a moment, I promise.

I spent about eighteen years of my life in Springfield, Illinois. For the past three or so years, give or take holidays and breaks when I went back to see my parents, I've been living in Urbana, Illinois to go to school at the University of Illinois. At most, these two "cities" are an hour and a half apart driving distance from each other.

In other words, I spent a great deal of my life in the Midwest. Needless to say, I want out.

The last time I left the country was my junior year of high school. My high school Latin Club went to Italy and Greece over a span of 18 days. It was the first time I felt free of my parents, of the general feeling that I was just a stranger who didn't fit in since all of us were tourists. Before that, my mother took me to the Philippines when I was two years old. I recall little of this trip.

So, here I am now, 21 years old and freshly graduated from college. In all truth, I could have done study abroad. Hell, even now there's the possibility of applying for a Fulbright Fellowship which would allow me to study in any country and write on any topic, perhaps even leading my own writing workshop. Yet something is holding me back. For some reason, I completely neglected to complete a draft of my application and ask for letters of recommendation from instructors/employers who undoubtably would have provided them for me. The same thing happened in all my applications for grad school (although my instructors recommended that I "see the world" and "experience life" first before re-selling my soul to academia) and Teach for America (although some people I've known in the program hate it).

At any rate, something is holding me back. All my life, it seems like someone's been there to hold my hand through everything. My parents insisted on escorting me by train all the way up to Chicago, taking the L to O'Hare and waiting for my plane with me when I went to Italy. Even when I was there, tour guides and chaperones regulated my movements in the country. I have never really been anywhere outside of Central Illinois on my own terms.

Granted, there was always the random invite to places a bit closer to home than Italy or the Philippines. Tom invited me to visit him in North Carolina before he moved to Amsterdam. Paul tried to get me to come up to Chicago just for sexual purposes. Yet it never occurred to me to just buy the ticket, pack a bag and make a long weekend excursion of it.

This is where the writing thing comes in. I mentioned earlier that my professors recommended that I "see the world" first. This is definitely a good idea since I've been in a rut writing-wise for awhile now. Nothing here inspires me anymore. I used to be able to just walk across the quad, smile at a stranger and want to write a poem about it. Now it seems like I really am just going through the motions.

Yet I still feel like something's holding me back. I wish I could understand what it was so I could break free of it, and thus, this place. I don't ever want to be one of those people who grows to love their prison, or depend on it to the point where they can't leave. I'm so afraid that I'll never really be able to do anything on my own, that I'll never grow up just like the girl in the "fairy tale" I wrote.

Maybe because once I leave, I know I have no intention of ever coming back. Maybe it's because I want to make sure everyone I could possibly miss will be gone or otherwise distant from me. I always tried to keep people at a distance with the justification that it would make it easier for me to leave.

But I'm still here.

So yeah, if there's anyone who'd like to see me, I'd be glad to keep you company until I figure out where I really want to go. Sorry about all the angst, but this really has been bothering me lately.