Average

Hey all!

So I guess my life is only as messy as the average college students now days. The average confusion, heartbreak and general confusion; maybe with some extra dancing, I mean we are in Africa.

I can think of very little to say to you all right now. I guess I’m just like any other angsty college student. I feel a little scared, very lost, and very small.

I’ve been trying to do some soul searching, but the problem is I seem to have misplaced it.

Suddenly things that had ceased to bother me when I was dealing with problems on the mission have come back in full. Now that I’m not worried about water and food and school fees (as much) I’m again worried about sex and love and friendship.

I feel like I’m in sort of a reinvention funk. When I’m not Aliya-saving-the-world who am I? Who is College-life-Aliya?

I been feeling lately like someone cut off my connection to the earths center and I am sort of floating away. I’d hold onto the grass to stay down but touching it is a 2,000 shilling fine at USIU. As is littering.

It’s strange the areas in our life that make us feel a mess. I am, for all intensive purposes, a very smart and very successful young woman with an excellent charity who was able to live on her own for quite a few months in a foreign city.

Except I feel like a little kid whispering “Please like me”

Now don’t get all worried, I AM making friends and many of them great friends. But I can’t stop feeling like people don’t like me enough, or don’t want me around, or just don’t think I’m that interesting.

I don’t know what I was expecting but I didn’t expect to feel so upside down.

But this has to be normal for everyone who moves right? Do all new freshmen feel like this? Is everyone’s confidence fake?

On one of my last nights in Chicago Matt, D-kwon, my father and I got into a sort of pseudo philosophical argument. I had put forth my two bit 40 proof theory that although there isn’t a fate leading us there is a balance in the universe. This balance doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone is happy it just means the universe is working at its most efficient. My theory was that each of us has an optimum path we can be on to help achieve this universal balance and when things in life suddenly start going well or going easy then you are on this optimum path.

Kenya felt like my optimum path at the time, which it still does, but whereas at the time it all seemed so clear my path has suddenly become hazy. I went from a corn field stretched highway to driving through the Appalachians. I just can’t see that far ahead. And now I have a nervous curiosity about the future. Like I’m walking along a ledge and need to inch slowly to get to the right place.

I don’t know. For now my “optimum path” is to go to all my classes, turn in my essays, and learn how to shake my ass like all the other girls here.

Miss you all and hope your not too cold back in Chicago!
Love,
Aliya