my old kentucky home

It's amazing to me, the way place can determine state of mind. I'm so glad I came home. There's just something about that word--home, and the feeling of being here. At home, I am unconditionally loved, cared for, comforted. Nothing even has to be said for me to feel that.

I'm becoming more and more sure that I don't want to go back to Radford in the fall, even if I feel better. It isn't that I don't like it there, that I don't like my professors, that I don't like my classmates... it's none of that. In fact, I love my clinical girls, and I love the place itself. It's just my psychological associations with the place that are negative. Radford is, and, I fear, will always be, the place where I am sick. The place where I can't function. The place where I am a failure. And I don't want to be reminded of that. I want to move on from this and start over...someday. I want to be able to be my normal self again, and not to have to prove anything to anyone. I just want to go somewhere and be me again, right from the beginning. That's part of the reason I love going to Emory so much. Just the place makes me feel better. Emory is the place where I am intelligent and capable and successful. When I'm there, it seems like every time I turn around, there's someone who's glad to see me--and the me they're glad to see is the old me, the one I am trying to be again. To the current me, that version of me seems like some sort of super hero, and it reminds me of the time my friend Scott told me that everything was going to be ok, that I could handle it because I'm Superwoman. And it gives me hope.

But here, I don't have to be anything at all. I don't feel like a failure, but I don't feel like something greater than I really am either. I just feel like me--a sick and tired and hurting and broken me, but me. And that's the best I can do for now.



Just as I am, though tossed about
With many a conflict, many a doubt,
Fightings and fears within, without,
O Lamb of God, I come, I come.