Exhaustion and Bravery...

I arrived in Montreal and let's say its so good to be home. To walk down the corridor of my old apartment, sleep on that sinkable marshmellow sofa, listen to the Quebecois, go through the motions of catching the metro and buses like I did everyday for school... it's a great homecoming feeling.

I arrived after a shitty bus ride that made me convinced never to take a greyhound bus again. I've had some bad experiences with them, and we were delayed, which is to be expected when crossing the boarder between Canada and the US. How I miss the Franco-Swiss boarder crossings where you, more often than not, don't even show your passport. Now that's a boarder crossing!

My life is exhausting me. I feel myself aging ridiculously (and no, it's not just my recent birthday that's making me say this). I am so tired but also, ready for more. What a paradox I am! I am the definitive Gemini. I want to stay home, I want to study, I want to work but I find myself checking out buses to Baltimore, flights to Istanbul, hostels in Warsaw and hotel deals in Rome.

On my many sleepless hours on the bus, I began to think about why I keep doing this to myself. I didn't come up with an answer. Perhaps I'm just never happy, never satisfied, and feel the need to run away.

When people hear about my life, the fact that I am 21 and have already been to 23 countries, that I average more than one flight per month and that I do it, for the most part, on my own, they comment on how brave I am. I don't agree with them. I am not brave. I am the opposite of brave. Brave would be staying somewhere, brave would be fighting for what I want. Personally, I feel that I have just taken the easy way out.

I have friends who moved abroad and started to make a life not even knowing the language, getting jobs, getting degrees and getting papers. That is brave. Me; what have I done? The most I've staying in one place in the last year is 4 months. Not quite - an even 16 weeks! I didn't even make the commitment to study here for a year. When I didn't get the internship I wanted in New York, I took the easy way and stayed in France. Well, the EASIER way - moving to France was not easy. But I didn't even have a real life there. I had a crazy half-life that was bound to end on May 30th. That's not brave. Brave is doing something when you don't know what will happen. I know what will happen. There was a BA flight waiting for me in Paris. That's not brave.

Sitting on the bus I thought of this and how I tend to run away when things get too hard. Staying in the US became too hard, too stressful, so I hopped on a bus to Canada. So I jumped the border. What about having my entire summer planned out? That's not brave. Not at all.

When people say I'm brave I smile politely. In reality, I'm the opposite of brave. I am stupid and naive and nothing about me is brave.

And although I wish I was braver, and stronger, and prettier and more outgoing and a million other things that I'm not, I find comfort in the fact that everyone feels like this sometimes. And although I hate it sometimes, I love that I don't just have one life, I have a multitude of lives that I jump in and out of- I have my Australian life, my Polish life, my French life, my Canadian life, my travel life, my Europe life, my America life. I get to live a plethora of lives simultaneously - that's the only way to look at it. And, let's face it, that's as close to immortality as I can dream of.