The Unknown

As you can imagine I've been pretty busy of late with the whole moving to the other side of the world thing. While I'm excited for the impending culture shock and having a sense of purpose back in my life I can't help feeling that eventually, everything will end up exactly the way it is now, with me sitting on my Parents couch on a Sunday morning, only this time I won't have a job to go to, I'll be a year older, and I'll be about $50, 000 in debt.

Given that the likelihood of me ever getting a book published is about 3% (a statistic I just pulled from the sky but that seems wholly optimistic to me) and that a masters in creative writing will hardly make me more marketable on the job front, this may all seem like an exercise in futility. And yet, I'm going to do it anyway.

There are moments in your life where you have to make choices. And often those choices are hard, perhaps even stupid. When I was 17 I decided not to go away to college. This was possibly due to fear, money concerns or perhaps a combination of both, but now, almost ten years later, I regret that decision and plan to make up for it in a big way.

I don't mean getting trashed, ignoring my classes and getting into stupid situations, after all, I'm not 18 any more and the times for me to act like that have passed. What I do mean is opening myself up to new experiences, meeting as many people as possible and coming out of this year long course with a better sense of myself as a writer and a person.

The great and terrifying thing about this is that for the next twelve months I have no idea what will happen. I'm having trouble making plans for Christmas because I honestly don't know what I'm going to want to do. If I'm a social pariah I'll be off to Essex the first chance I get, if not, I may want to hang out in Newcastle for a while.

For someone who has always has a plan (muddled though it may be) the fact that I have no idea what's going to happen is kind of freaking me out! and at the same time it's partly the reason that I'm doing this in the first place. I've said before that I'd love to go on an adventure. And while this isn't equal to bungee jumping in New Zealand or backpacking through Europe, it's as close as I'm going to get for a while.

I'm hoping that the course and accompanying adventure will more than make up for the cost, debt, stress and inevitably failure. And if not at least I'll have a story for my impending novel.