Spare some change?

Part of my uber-monotonous job at King County has recently been to courier documents to the courthouse down the street from my office. A couple of days ago I was passing the tiny convenience store in the lobby when I noticed a sign posted in the window.

No Change Without a Purchase, it said.

The wording struck me as being a little ironic, and the more I thought about it the more overly philosophical I became about it. I know it's a little melodramatic and backwards on my part, but my life of late has been nothing but change. The idea that I might have to make a purchase in return struck me as odd, if only for the fact that I had never considered it before.

Being back in Seattle has been simultaneously deeply gratifying and emotionally exhausting for me. I longed to come "home" - the semantics of which I have questioned before and, for considerations of length and reader boredom will ignore in this particular post, although I do reserve the right to return to the issue at a later time - but it's become painfully obvious to me that the Seattle I left in the summer is not the same Seattle I returned to in the wintertime. Or maybe it's a little more accurate to say that the Becca I left in last summer is not the same one I returned to in the winter. Everything is different now: Lindsey's not here, I'm strangely and quite frighteningly single, and - maybe the most horrifying thing of all - I've grown up in ways that I neither expected nor in many cases necessarily especially enjoy.

All that, and the emotional roller coaster of waiting for graduate school decisions is starting to wear me thin. I've been accepted back to the University of Washington but still haven't heard from them on funding, and I've been placed on a waiting list at Princeton. The result of this scenario is that it is well past March 15th, the technical deadline for most schools' admissions decisions, and I still don't know where I'll be living in six months. This was supposed to be over by now. I am tired. And the more I think about it, the more I realize that no matter what happens I have no option of standing still in my comfort zone. If I go back to UW, it won't be the same as when I was there before. Lindsey and Andy won't be there, the school work will be of a drastically different format, and my personal life will have drastically changed. On the off-chance that Princeton actually offers me admission there are a host of life changes involved with that situation as well, not the least of which would be a move across the country to a mind-numbingly different culture. I'm more scared of living on the east coast than I was of living in China. Roy, my friend in Taiwan, used to always give me the same advice: "Just keep walking." As great as that advice is, it appears that at this point I have no choice but to keep walking, and that makes me slightly resentful of the path. Sometimes I look around me and get so jealous of the "normal" people, those who can be content to stand still.

At the same time, though, I know that in the end I could never be truly satisfied with that kind of a life. I can't make copies for the rest of eternity. I could never be content with myself if I sat here wondering what it was I could have been. I have to grow up, because everything inside of me still screams that there are things I need to do, that there's a reason I'm here, and that it is absolutely vital that I find out what that reason is. That I keep walking. And so I make the choice to keep putting one foot in front of the other, and to pay the price that entails.

No growth without sacrifice. No change without a purchase.

Sometimes I just wish they took returns.