A thank you to what I could have been.

I had a plan. A plan that I had come up with since my family had decided to uproot my life sophomore year and move me across the country, from my wonderful town in Northern California, to the place I still call hell, Central Florida. The plan was to get back their as soon as possible, it was the only thing I could think about, the only thing I wanted. I knew I would go back, attend community college with my best friend for two years, we would get our own apartment, do the things our parents wouldn't let us do, go on weekend adventures and suffer through classes because that was what everyone else was doing. Eventually we would go to some mainstream college in Southern California, party just as much as we studied, get a degree in something that would make a lot of money, and along the way I would meet the love of my life and we would get married a few years after college, settle down, and have a family. This had always been the dream, it had always been every ones dream. 

Then something happened, something I don't really understand to this day. In the beginning it was small things, my best friend and I started talking less, the time difference and our schedules not melding together in the way they used to. Then I found myself falling completely and irrevocably in love with writing. I loved knowing a character like the back of my hand, loved creating little quirks and oddities specific to them. I loved creating intricately woven plot lines. We used to do everything together, but now it was like we were strangers who shared a common past, and I was to busy daydreaming about daring knights and fire breathing dragons to notice. Then came the time of questioning. In the beginning it started off with simple things. Wondering why I had to get a degree in something that I didn't really love just because it made a lot of money, wondering why I had to settle down and have kids with a man just because thats what everyone else was (of course this led to the realization that I never wanted to settle down with a man), finally there was the last question that really put the nail in my old dreams coffin: do I really want to go back to California at all? Sure I loved it more then any other place I had ever been, but I still haven't been very many places, and all of a sudden I just knew that I needed to see and learn and just take in all the world around me. I wanted more then anything to be free, to be able to live my life and find out everything that I want to know about the world. I didn't want to settle down and make any big descisions I wanted to be free enough that I can make a thousand little descisions and find out a million differnt things that I would have no other opportunity knowing.

These are the things that I want, I want the opportunity to know and to be whatever it is my mind can come up with, and I want to thank my old dreams for giving me the opportunity realize what it is that I truly want, and for helping me shape myslf into the person I am toay. it took a lot of thinking, and second guessing, and being terrified of breaking out of the mold that I had set myself up to become, but I am here now, and I couldn't be here without you.