'Today's' The Day

Well technically Tomorrow is the Day, but that title sounded a little weird.

In less than twelve hours I will be on a bus or train or cab to Connecticut to start my publishing internship. This internship is a year in the making. I mean At 23, should I still be having first day jitters. Yes, I have been in the office before, I have met and talked to 2 out of the 3 people that i will be working with for the next 3 months, and yet...I am nervous. More than nervous, I border on being completely and utterly scared shitless.

I mean a year ago I landed in New York and had just gone on a interview for a job as a underwriter for speciality insurance. Seriously. Now, after a whole year of being a bookseller and interning for Lenny, I finally have a publishing internship. The publishing house is a small one because it is a division of a much larger corp, because of this I will literally be working in an office of 3 people (not including me), but still it's a lot closer to getting a real job than I was a year ago.

Yesterday I had a small anxiety attack. I haven't had one in such a long time that it freaked me out. It came out of nowhere (well not nowhere) and I had to go outside to catch my breath. Before the attack, I was sitting in the living room and I felt suffocated by the presence of my aunt and cousins. I looked over to my left and my aunt and cousin where sitting on the couch, the couch that i would soon be sleeping on. And all I could think about was the fact that where my aunt was sitting was where my head would be resting in a few minutes. Right there. Where her ass was resting.

Of course, this led me to obsess over my lack of privacy here. That I don't have a place I can escape too, and before I knew it I started to worry that things would never get better. That after working at my crap job, interning, sleeping on the couch and watching the Disney channel with a four year old, all I would have to show for my hard work was a couch and frozen dinners. Sometimes I worry about my future, I have irrational thoughts about where I will end up. For the most part I know (and hope) that one day I will be able to look back on these times with fondness, but sometimes the little voice in my head worries that 'this is it'.

I calmed down of course after a jog and a talk with both my mom and Marie but still it freaked everyone out including myself. Ever so often I think about going back to therapy. In all honesty I would have continued seeing a therapist if I was in school, and the only reason I don't see one now is because I can't afford it. But with all these changes a coming, my anxiety is all over place. I am finding it harder and harder to stay optimistic even though things are looking up.

But because I don't have the luxury of seeing someone every other week who will quell my fear and anxieties, I can do nothing else but hope these attacks don't as much due to these changes that are happening.

So, tomorrow I set off on my first day of this new internship. I am nervous, just like the first day of school, or the first time I spent a night at someones house, far away from my mom. I am nervous just like the first time I sat behind the wheel of car and started the ignition to the sound of the engine spurting to life. It's that feeling, when you suddenly realize your whole life has come to the point where you don't think you can conquer the obstacle in front of you until you've conquered it. Until you've stepped through the door of your Kindergarten class, or put the car into motion after you've stepped lightly off the brake, and breathed.