Breakthrough at 27!

On my 27th birthday my house was finally fixed, but it had all caused me to feel trapped in Chambersburg. I spent New Years in Charlotte with Sherah and got to spend time with a friend from my DTS who was living down there. I drove down with Valerie and there was something wrong with the horn on her car. If you turned the steering wheel to the left it honked. Loudly. If you did a long turn, it sounded like you were laying on the horn. If you tried to break it up into short turns, it went honk, honk, honk, honk. Whenever we went into gas stations, or stopped to eat, we made a grand enterance with our honking and everyone was looking and annoyed and we would fall out of the car laughing. Sherah's neighborhood was classy and already annoyed all the time at her and her roommates because of noise and the amount of people coming in and out. Well, we didn't arrive until around midnight and honked the whole way through the neighborhood. It wasn't until the next day that Val thought about cutting the wire on the horn to make it stop.

In March, Lane invited me to come spend a weekend together in NYC again and I added on a trip to New Haven as well. It was wonderful to spend time with dear friends who had known me, who believed in me, who could remind me how far I had come and that I was heading in the right direction. A few weeks after that, Brett and I took a road trip down to Wesley's wedding in Charlotte. We talked the entire way and by that I mean that Brett talked the first hour and I talked the next 5, but it was a blast. We had so much fun down there hanging out with friends and I actually did karaoke for the first time to Enrique of course. Kris joined us for he drive home. On the way down we had stopped at a Subway for lunch and had the scariest workers who Brett said appeared to have just gotten out of jail and were stingy with the toppings. Brett complained the whole time about this Subway. On the way home we decided we were hungry and not paying attention, we saw a sign for an exit with a Subway and pulled off and ended up at the exact same Subway. : )

That summer I decided that I wanted to start attending a series of leadership seminars by the organization Klemmer and Associates. I looked online for where their next basic level one would be held and it was in New Haven which was perfect because I already knew my way around and could stay with at Ricci & Jeremy's. It started on Friday and ended on Sunday and it was one of the best decisions I have ever made. I started realizing how much of lost of me. Let me just say that I love Chambersburg and have lots of fabulous friends here who love me for who I am, but I am certainly not the "normal Chambersburg woman" and I had a hard time my first few years because people felt like they should inform me where I was falling short. I don't cook, I am not married, I am loud and boisterious. I don't dress conservitively. I make rash choices and I don't really hide much. Without realizing it, I had started taking a back seat in life so as not to have to hear people's opinions. On Saturday when we were informed that we would have lunch free and then I realized that everyone had seperately come up and asked me if I wanted to have lunch with them and they were all ages, there as a part of me that finally came back alive and I remembered, "Hey I am fun and people like to be around me!" I also realized that I hadn't traveled internationally for years and that was such a huge part of what makes me feel alive. I decided that I was going to plan an international trip. A few months before, a blog I had followed of a guy named Bobby Earle who was a photographer and lover of travel had announced a trip to Thailand and Cambodia for photographers. Although I was one, I still wanted to go because the places they traveled looked SO amazing and he & his wife seemed to travel in a similar way that I do. I figured that all 12 spots would be full, but within a week of making the commitment to myself that I would travel internationally, Bobby posted that he had 4 more spots left. I wrote explaining that I wasn't a photographer, but why I wanted to go and he said, "Come along!" I sent in my deposit, bought a nice camera and then... I FROZE! I couldn't talk about it when anyone would ask me about it. The economy was bad and I always heard people I knew were making WAY more than me saying that they couldn't afford things way less frivolous than a dream trip, but there was no backing out now. That time really showed me that there are always going to be a million reasons NOT to do something, but hey, why not do it anyways???

Which is how I ended up in a car at the butt crack of dawn with Bonnie on the way to NYC for a Stilleto Run to raise awareness for Stop Child Trafficing Now in the pouring rain the day before I was leaving for San Francisco. And it was amazing!

That October I also traveled to San Francisco to do the next step in the Klemmer Leadership Training programs. Advanced leadership was probably the hardest thing I have ever done in my life, but absolutely has changed the way I lived. My eyes were opened to how much I had been living with a victim mentality and how it felt safe, but was robbing my life of possibilities. I had moved to PA and wanted to prove that I could live a "normal life" that I hadn't lived in my early years and I had succeeded. The problem was that I was not designed for the normal life. I a dreamer. I am a couragious, confident, competent and perserving woman and I have a huge destiny ahead of me that requires my individuality, not some clone of what others believe I should be.

A funny thing happened when I returned home with my new found confidence. Not only did the comments and teasing that I received from others not affect me as much, but they really decreased. Words still hurt, but when others know that their words can't make you feel as belittled and small as they had intended, they tend to not say them as much.

It was funny when I was at last able to talk about my trip and Bobby had sent us a schedule of what we would be doing each day. I of course paid NO attention to it, but Crissyand Jill went through and did research for me on the locations I would be in.