This is fun...let's keep looking back!

February 16, 2008 It was a blustery cold afternoon and we gathered at a kind of dive in Northeast Minneapolis. saw just needed to blow off some of the week. The three of us (Dana, Sathiya, and myself) weren’t going to go originally but found ourselves walking in together in a clump. After all, we are AmeriCorps members and we’re clumpers that way. The principal was there and made a crack about my driving before I sat down and I sorta felt self-conscious so when I sat down I made sure to sit as close to Dana as possible. Pretty soon Val walks in and I get temporary moment of panic that calms after she smiles at me. You can tell she feels just as out of place as I do so I feel at ease a little bit. That’s what its like to live with social anxiety. It’s like you live with a bubble around you all the time. With your thoughts surrounding you. “I don’t belong here” “You’re not good enough for these people.” “Go home to where you belong. You don’t deserve this.” Shut up! I scream mentally and then see the other Ms. Peterson walk in. I’m surprised, but again comforted. I didn’t expect to find her here, but she makes me feel at home where ever she finds me, so I am instantly comforted when she sits down immediately across from the three of us. Only until the crew from next door and across the hall sit down on the other side of me. I don’t know what it is about them, but Martha S. and B Kattner have started to make me nervous ever since the great guided reading debate of ’08. Oh man. I also just found out that Danielle got her India trip moved back to September so I may actually get a chance to find a job by then! And move up there! So this is a perfect place to end this journal actually. I’ve made Minneapolis my life for 6 months. Now after six more months of settling in, it will be time to move on to bigger and brighter pastures. New York maybe include din that. Who knows. the world is my oyster and I can do anything. I choose to doe! If teaching is included in that, it is. If it’s not , it’s not, and I’m not going make a huge deal about it. Life is about letting myself have a good time. I’m getting back on my happy pills soon and I will go with the flow. And I’m out of space. Time for a new beginning. That was the end of my first year in Minneapolis and the last journal from AmeriCorps. Turns out I never ended up going to New York, but spent two more years in Minneapolis and flew to Korea to teach for a year there. Life takes ya funny places. I wonder where it will take me next? I wonder where it will take me next?