reinvent yourself
As the time for me to leave approaches, I'm realizing more and more how much I'm seeing this trip to Tokyo as a chance to reinvent myself. In a way, this "chrysalis" makes me nervous, as it's a feeling I've experienced over and over during great transitions-- and one that has several times been disastrously disappointing or superficial. Looking back, I can pinpoint many major times in my life when I've left one place for another with the thought that somehow the change might make me into someone likeable, someone amazing, someone worthy of other people's respect. Of course, my insecurity amounts from a large pool of residual self-loathing from my younger years but thankfully as I've matured, this insecurity has lessened. If I focus on the hard transitions in my life, I find I have a great amount of fear toward change. But if I look at the overall picture... namely how much I HAVE changed over the course of the last few large moves along my path... I find that I am greatly satified. I've become thoughtful, poised, emotionally mature, confident and outgoing. I still have a long way to go with respect to my confidence levels but I have "come into my own" in a great many things. Without the awful, sinking losses I've encurred, I wouldn't be the person I am today.

That's not to say, of course, that I'm satisfied with who I am. I want to feel that I am something other than mediocre, fatigued, and more than occasionally depressed. I want to be happy, not mellow. I want to be joyful and full of energy. My problem is that I can analyze to no end the source and roots of all my problems; hunt them down and seek them out, know them and understand them, but still be unable to change them. And too often (as is now) I resort to manifesting my need for change in superficial ways. Some of these ways are legitimate outlets (like working out at the gym) but others are purely surface level. What concerns me is that I've made going to Tokyo into a superficial change of a great degree. I've bought "nice" clothes (dresses, skirts) so that I won't feel underdressed in a crowd that doesn't often wear jeans and t-shirts. I've bought makeup so that I can "dress up if I want to." I have bags, shoes, hairbands galore that I didn't have before. Silly STUFF.

There are, of course, two sides to this change. On the one hand, there are of course things I needed to get before departure. There also seems to be no harm in having picked up nice clothes because a) I'm such a tomboy I didn't HAVE any of those things and b) I look nice in them and enjoy wearing them. I don't see a huge problem with being prepared and anticipating presenting myself in a nice way. However, there's a part of me that says, "What are you DOING?? You're supposed to get RID of stuff and pack LESS!!" In a way I am... but it's in the way that middle school children feel it's neccesary to go out before the first day of high school and get a whole new wardrobe so that no one will recognize them in their old clothes. It's silly to say that I won't be the same person because I know I will, or that no one will recognize me because I know they will... and it isn't that I'm leaving the old me behind... it's just that the FEELING of that potential to TRY worries me. I don't want to try to invest myself in STUFF. As much as I like being able to feel well-dressed and well-prepared, I always feel guilty with every purchase I make. I don't want what I own to be ME. I want this change to be more than an image thing.

The reason I'm having difficulty is only really because I can't anticipate what is to come. So far, the change is ONLY superficial but that's JUST because I haven't yet arrived in Tokyo and experienced the journey that will shape me. I don't know what will happen and I can't see how it will change me. So I think, in a way, that I bury myself in material transititions, partially because I know what sort of "superficial" attention someone like me (5' 11", blonde, blue-eyes) will attract in Tokyo and that pleases me. I feel guilty for wanting that attention and worried that it will go to my head. Overall, I think I fear that the change will be negative rather than positive. But I'm just chasing ghosts. The metaphysical, spiritual, personal changes that I experience overseas are beyond my comprehension right now but I'm sure they'll be worth it. And I'm sure they'll be worth more than looking like a new woman on the outside.