She's Leaving Home...

She's leaving home
after living alone
for so many years...

A thunderclap has just sounded over our elementary school. *Laugh* Quite the drumroll or way of saying, "ATTENTION! Elise is not coming back...yet"

This September, I will be flying across the ocean to Matamata, New Zealand, as part of a Discipleship Training Program (DTS) with Youth With a Mission (YWAM)...try to keep up with the initials. This DTS is a program designed to train young adults in their Christian faith, immersing them in training, lectures, and studies with the pillars of the faith. This training is then followed by a three month outreach, and with my program, in Australia, New Zealand, or Fiji (whichever they place you). I'm very excited, and nervous...but mostly inquisitive, I suppose.

What's really awesome about my particultar program is that it has a "music flavour," where my extra activities will be designed around worship and the facilitation of worship for the program. Woo hoo!

Okay, so seriously now, what does a Beatle's song have to do with this (besides the obvious leaving theme?) I think the Beatle's were working on the irony that someone could be alone in a home for so many years. I've chose the opposite irony for myself: After living alone for so many years, distancing myself from people, afraid of friendships, and never becoming attached to anyone or anything, I finally found a "home" in Bloomington. And now I'm leaving. But I'm actually LEAVING...let me explain more.

The semantics of leaving vs. exiting is very important to me. For most of my life I have made exits: exit stage right, exit the building, exiting cities. There was no form of attachment, no personal facet to these departures. But now I'm leaving: I'm leaving people and places that I finally call home. And for the first time in nearly a decade, I'm actually sad...and I don't know exactly how to handle this.

I don't like showing I am sad. To me it reveals that you mean enough to me to alter the way I feel. You affect me. You have some power over me. It denotes weakness. Okay, maybe not, but for a decade it did mean that. And now, at the age of 23, after relearning how to be a friend and often failing miserably, but continuing to grow and try try again, I have to leave behind the people I have finally allowed myself to care about. And to say I care about them is hard too.

Not only that, but the people I have associated with Bloomington are becoming individuals, not longer a collective "Bloomington people". Some are leaving town all together, some to different cities and some to different countries. Others are changing their vocational identity: I have one friend who I have known as music for the past 2 years, and now he's going into optometry. Quoi?? That's not who you are...or at least who I have known you to be...

So often I have been the pioneer of adventure, and everyone maintained their normalcy. I would leave town, and return, and nothing would change. The faces are the same, the businesses are the same, and so on. But now, I go home, and I don't recognize people at my church. My friends back home in Pittsburgh are growing apart. My best friend now lives in New York. When did everyone decide to move on, too?

So I don't know how to say goodbye. I don't know how to end this chapter of my life. Part of me wants to escape and slip away without people knowing. Then I don't have to face it. The other part of me wants to be around the people I love every hour of everyday, because then I can create the allusion that they're not leaving. Neither is feasible or logical. But how do you say goodbye when you've never really said it before?

I finally have a home, and now I'm leaving. Ironic, isn't it? Am I coming back? The tenative plan is no. I'm applying to grad schools all over the country for speech pathology. Maybe I'll be called to full time international ministry. Maybe my CD will skyrocket off the charts while I'm away.

I have no way to end this blog. I told you I'm bad with goodbyes.