Self Medication in the Finals Days.

I felt a kind of quiet nervousness descend on me today. It's amazing that I can literally be one week away from landing in Cairo and still manage to avoid confronting that reality. But it is hitting me. I can tell by my nearly compulsive need today to clean and sift, sort and organize my college papers, the high school mementos in my room, the old pictures I have stashed in drawers and taped to mirrors...it's my way of tidying each phase of life in my mind, remembering who I was and who I have been, and then laying the past back down in order to embrace this newest chapter. I find myself doing this at every major milestone--real or imagined. I like thinking in terms of chapters. The cardboard boxes in the basement crawl space labelled "elementary school art projects" "high school papers" and messily captioned photo albums all exist as testament to my instinct to chronicle.
The problem with saying goodbye to one phase of life to begin another is--as one friend recently put it--that you suddenly realize, "shit! The grass was already green!"
As I pull up my roots for the dozenth time in the past 5 years, I always have to wonder if I'm crazy for doing so. This time is a little different, though--after graduation, you get shoved out of the nest whether you invite it or not. Staying in Seattle without a clear sense of purpose would be as scary--if not scarier--than trying out my hand in Egypt. Even if my purpose in Egypt this next year seems a bit vague to me (I'm sure I'll be lying awake on day #4 in Cairo wondering what in the world I'm doing in this remote patch of the Saharan desert), my only response is that there was no where else I wanted to be more than in Egypt. So that's where I'll be. Not much of a concrete reassurance, but it will do.
In the meantime, I continue to approach this all in the most womanly of ways--soothing my anxiety by keeping my hands busy, my inner monologue reassuring, and taking care of myself. In my past week of solitude, I've calmed myself by watering my mother's plants, watching movies with my dog, washing dishes, taking long showers, reading Alice Munro at coffee shops, eating small bites of Ben and Jerry's cheesecake brownie ice cream, drinking red wine before bed. Out of a slightly panicked need to feel some continuity, I was suddenly seized with the desire to redecorate my room at home just like my apartment in Seattle. I'm not sure how my parents will feel about Frida Kahlo in their guest room, but it's nice to see her unibrows smiling down at me as I sleep... ?
I'm not sure if it's the best way to face down the inevitable nervousness that comes right before you plunge into some new and unknown context, but it can't be the worst.