Tonight is the night before I finally leave for college. It's been a gap year and then a summer, and yet still nothing quite feels right.
Maybe it's the fact I expected it to feel more significant, maybe it's the fact that I
really am about to go change my life forever by putting myself on a track to finally leave the country, presumably for good. It feels like things should be slower, but I'm already entering 300 level classes in my first year there, so I doubt I'll be there for very long.
Leaving people and things behind hurt far more than expected. At first I told myself that I'd be back every month to check on my friends and such, but soon enough this convenient reality I had come up became an impossibility. 10 hour roundtrip drives combined with no job lined up at school and a barely usable car has made this all too real. There is no easy way back once I go, the only way out is to pray I fight through my classes alright and get out of there in three-ish years.
But leaving most of my life behind in my small town along the Appalachians has also given me another strange question to answer:
Did anything I do for the first 18 years of my life even matter? It seems like nothing I did in my early life will have long lasting practical applications past my first year of college, and after that it feels like I'll have to find some new grand way to prove myself just to end up in a job where I can work, retire from, and then realize I didn't leave a lasting impact in the end.
Sure I've ran tournaments, I established our local FGC scene at our town college, I started businesses, came up with the train factory, failed at (many) projects, and did many other things, but 5 years from now, when I'm gone from my country and no one remembers me except for a guy who did some project in the past...
Am I leaving other things and people behind, or am I leaving myself to be forgotten due to my own lack of effort?