On doing things for the right reasons.

My gosh, I feel weird. Whenever I talk about leaving, I feel like I'm dreaming.

This move has brought about a very interesting and unexpected revelation. I have to admit something...when I made up my mind to go for it, in my head I did two things:

1. I decided that the perfect moment to make a change was never going to present itself and I needed to take matters in to my own hands.

2. I basically told myself that my life/job here would go on without me, the same as it had before.Maybe even better.

There is a fair amount of injustice in the second thought on leaving and I'm so happy to have come to this realization while there is still time to prove myself wrong.

I really thought that my boss disliked me. I'm late, I am impulsive and therefore easily distracted, I talk too much, I apologize too much, I over-explain everything. I know that she gets frustrated with me and she's pretty much the only person at work that I care about disappointing. I am very fond of her and I have a lot of respect for her. It's not like I'm a bad employee, I am good at my job. But if she has to mention something to me that I need to work on, it bothers me and makes me feel like I'm the "squeaky wheel". Even though she has always helped me out and been there for me, I always thought she did that out of obligation, not because she liked me.

I was CERTAIN that when I resigned, she'd be indifferent or even a little bit happy. In retrospect, this is pretty unhealthy but it's just kind of how I am. I wrote a post on how I usually expect the worst from people.

Anyway, when I resigned....she was not happy. She told me she was sad to see me go. She told me that she wanted me to stay. It was touching and very sobering. A lot of people are sad. A lot of people care and want to know what my plans are. It's an amazing feeling to see that people you barely know will notice that you are no longer around. To know that you made an impact, even a small one. While I'm excited to move on and experience life in a different place, I think it's important not to trivialize my life here or to think of moving as somehow discarding my love for my home town.

After putting thought into this, I am actually LESS nervous about leaving because I  have a clearer understanding of the love from the people I already know and I feel like if things should go wrong, I'll always have a home to come back to. I'm not "transplanting" myself, I'm "expanding" myself.

P.S. I really did print out your comments from my move announcement! I can't tell you enough how much they mean to me.

P.P.S. For those of you who have asked, Ryan is definitely involved in this whole moving thing! He's actually FROM Baltimore and continues to work there which means...he never really left. So it's all good. He's so dashingly worldly and experienced that I'm sort of focusing on my own feelings in my moving posts up until now but, I'm sure I'll have some comical stories to share once I start losing my mind attempting to box up 5,000 fragile teacups. He loves to help with things like that :)