This is pretty much an emo blog about me and kind of about traveling, I don't normally write because I always come across as whiney and ignorant, which I probably am to most of you well traveled folk. This is just for me to get some things off my chest, I can't afford a shrink and many friends have suggested to write a blog. So please if you do read this, don't put me down for trying to open up. (and please forgive my poor wrting skills)

I first felt lost when I was fifteen and my mother died. Up until then I didn't have a care in the world, I always knew where I stood. She guided me through everything, told me what I needed to do and made sure I did it: "Go walk the dog", "take the trash out", "do your homework", "brush your teeth", you know typical motherly things. For six years since her death I've been going in circles. The one of the only times since that fateful day I have ever felt truly alive and in my place, I had no clue where I was going. One week after I had turned 18 I took all the income I'd made that year and bought a place for myself on a tour. So scared my hands wouldn't stop shaking, a teary eyed father at my back, and no idea of the adventure ahead I boarded my plane and left the country. I'd been running and hiding for months before this moment still haunted by the missing presence of my mother and recently broken-hearted from a bad first love, when that plane took off even though I knew I was still running I instantly felt like I had a purpose again, a place, a reason for why I had continued to move each day. My running didn't stop, I kept running for the meesly three weeks I had to spend while I was on the tour, but each day my confidence got less and less, "what am I doing here? I miss my friends." Even with the best tour guide a scared 18 year old could ask for, I was feeling lost again, but for that first week we spent in Italy I'd never felt more in the right or more alive than those seven days. I still dream about those sunflower fields through Tuscany and that bar off the beach in Cinque Terre.

There has been one other week since then I again felt alive. Running from a great man who just wasn't right for me and quitting my pathetic attempt at getting an AA degree at 19 I joined a volunteer organization called Americorps and hopped on a free plane ride to Denver, Colorado. For that first week I had escaped, left my worries behind and had entered a place with over two hundred other people in the same boat as me. I was happy again, for about a week.

I'm not saying that I have never experienced a happy moment or day except for those few weeks, I'm simply explaining that I have never felt truly alive, except for these instances, since I was fifteen.

I wake up everyday go to work, school, and make love to my boyfriend, but I can't wait to go home and fall asleep making a wish that I won't have to wake up and do it again the next day. It's a never ending pattern. Don't get me wrong I love a lot of things in life, I love life, but I hate who I am and what I do to get by. Every. Single. Day. I dream of leaving, every moment. I imagine quitting my good paying, all the benefits I need, only forty hours a week, I work with people I like job. I think about what it would be like not having homework to do when I finally get home at 10pm after a 3 hour class. I see myself dumping my gorgeous, loves me for me, holds me close each night, smart, funny boyfriend. I want to leave my low rent with the best roomates ever, still to big for even the three of us, house that I was raised in home. All because I don't know what it feels like to want to do anything anymore. I don't want to get up, I don't want to leave the house, I don't feel the motivation to do anything. I am dead inside it just takes too much effort to feel things anymore. I know I will feel better if I just let it all go, all of it. No job. No school. No boyfriend. No home. If I just did what so many of you do, travel. Vagabonding. Backbacking. Into the Wild style. I'm too scared though. Way too scared. So scared of the unkown that I would rather put up with the life I have created for myself in misery, then go and find what happiness I can.

I wish I had the guts and creativity that all of you Matador members seem to have to get out in the world, to feel alive, to travel without a dime in your bank accounts. If only I could give myself what you give yourselves so often. I just want to get out. To feel alive enough to want to go for a walk. The only two times I've felt truly alive in the last six years were when I had the courage to leave it all behind.