I had a friend once tell me that I have the worst flight syndrome of anyone she has ever met. I had another friend tell me that not only am I a runner, I also run away from anything I find unpleasant. I have been described as flaky and as flighty and I don't argue because all of these descriptions are true. A clever combination of mental illnesses has led me to be the kind of person who may or may not show up and who may or may not stick around. I am working on it constantly, but I don't always live up to my own standards of who I want to be.

I have moved around a lot as an adult. Sometimes I have moved out of necessity, sometimes I have moved because I wanted to, and other times I have moved because I needed desperately to change my scenery so that I would survive. I am preparing to move again and because this is something that I am always working on, I have been questioning my motives and taking stock of my reasons.

I don't want to always be the girl who flees. I don't always want to be the girl that has to start over when things aren't going her way. I think that sometimes our survival instincts become corrupted and we start doing things as a means of protecting ourselves without realizing that we are doing ourselves a disservice. This can look many different ways from alcoholism, to overeating, to self-harm, to moving around every time the going gets tough.

I have to separate who I am from who I want to be and I have to take a long, hard look at how those two people line up. This is one of the hardest things I have ever had to do and I never realized that I would have to do it at all until I got sober, probably because I was intoxicated so long and so heavily that I never realized there was any need to change. However, now with a sober pair of eyes and a sober mind I realize that the need to change is constant.

I will never stop moving, although someday I hope to stop escaping, and I will never stop changing. Life is a constant journey with the constant need for introspection and betterment. If want the person I am and the person I want to be to ever line up, I have to keep working toward that. Whether I live in Colorado or in Washington or anywhere else, I am stuck with myself. However, I have the power to be any version of myself that I want to be. I can be a yoga teacher, I can be a runner, I can be the perpetual student, I can be an ophthalmic technician, I can be a teacher, and onward and onward until I have achieved and become everything I want. I just have to keep trying.