By the time this posts, it will have been exactly one year since I came back to America; since I started the journey from Krakow, Poland back to Tulsa, OK. That trip alone could be a post of its own… trekking around Krakow city airport buildings in the snow, starving on my Oslo layover because I was too broke to buy anything in the airport, and the time I burst into tears on the plane when I ended up sitting next to the typical American college kids obsessing over the British Starbucks and selfies with the Eiffel tower… I was already dreading the transition that I wasn't sure I would make. I know a lot of you will understand that.

When I first came back to the States, I jumped around a lot. Tulsa to Florida to North Carolina to Hawaii… unsettled, undecided; unsure that I wanted to settle or decide. It took a good six months and lots of miles, but I ended up back in Tulsa. It was a good decision. This place is steady, and having somewhere to crash land is a good thing.

At first, the moving around was something that defined me, something that sparked confidence… I had traveled, I had just moved back, I was interesting and vibrant and had stories and foreign words. I could strike up a conversation with anyone because I always had something to bring; there was always a surprise.

I did cool things… it made me confident.

It wasn’t the travel itself I found my confidence in, it was all of the little things that it meant I could do. It was the ability to live on my own, and find my way through towns that spoke no English, and the thrill of hitchhiking through Eastern Europe, being the foreigner, and constantly finding myself in a whirlwind of a thousand voices and a thousand possibilities and a thousand ideas. It was like this slow-burning adrenaline rush that I got to live out.

That was me.

But that isn’t me now.

Now it’s not something I am, it’s something I did. It’s something I accomplished, or attempted depending on how you look at it… but it’s not something I bring up when I meet you. It’s not something I mention in passing. It’s something you have to dig out of me. It used to be. It’s part of my story, but it’s in the what was, not the what is.

It doesn’t live in me as my go-to confidence booster anymore. I’ve been stripped down and pulled all the way back to the beginning. It’s just a much more grown up version of me that’s at the starting line this time, finding myself again, but we’re still back where uncertainty dances with possibility and it’s exciting but also scary; stirring up new dreams and facing new challenges and constantly arriving in a state of change.

It’s a good lesson for me.

It’s a good thing to have to learn who you are, apart from what you do. We get caught up in our jobs, and they become our definitions. I am a teacher, I am a writer, I am a nursing student… I am a lot of things.

But my confidence is in myself, and who I am even when all of those names and titles and jobs exist or don’t exist.

I will always revel in the idea that I took on the adventure of a lifetime, and I will always seek after adventure... but the adventure will change, and that’s okay. That’s growing. Maybe it’ll be nursing school instead of Bulgarian mountains or a deep, meaningful relationship instead of a stranger who doesn’t know my language; maybe it’ll be writing again. Maybe it’ll be going after the marathon race I always talk about.

I will always want to talk about travel wth you, and foreign cities we've been to, and the wonder of budget airlines we've all gotten surprise charges on, and how beautiful I think Romanian money is. I’ll always want to plan trips and go everywhere and do everything. I’ll always love that I went. I’ll always want to go back. But I’ll always want to come home too… I’ll always want to stay.

So when my one year back hits… I’ll look at pictures of Bulgaria and try to read Cinderella in Bulgarian again, and look at that tattoo I got and smile at the memory it’ll bring… but I'll be happy, too. I'll be proud of myself for going, and proud of myself for staying. I'm definitely going to cry a little bit, but it'll be from a place of contentment, because I’m standing on the edge of a whole new adventure. And I'm proud of that.