As usual, I've gotten behind on my blog.  I guess the act of writing, especially about traveling, makes me want...more.  When I'm writing, I long to learn, to experience, to grow, to have adventures...and over this past year I was living a life where those thoughts were a bit...dangerous isn't exactly the right word.  Well, thinking too much about traveling, writing, learning, having adventures made me dissatisfied with the life I was living.  It was easier to just not think about those things as I tried to be "normal" and settle in to small-town life.  So I focused my mind on other things, because the days I spent listening to travel podcasts or researching destinations made me feel like a traitor to this life I thought I wanted.

In the end, the dissatisfaction with that life won out.  I don't want to have to avoid what makes me happy, what makes me feel alive, what makes me feel like I'm developing myself as a person, just to be relatively contented in a life that I'm told is "normal" and that everyone around me is happy with.  And so I've left that life, and although I hate that it hurt the person I shared that life with, I can look to the future with excitement again.  I'm still staying in middle Tennessee for a while; I've got a (broken down, unfortunately) car to pay off, a new job, and some life-organizing to do, and besides, I need to save up some money.  But I'm planning.  I'm dreaming.  I'm living my life again, instead of tagging along on someone else's.

And so, I decided it was time to revive this blog.  I've got so many stories I've never told, and now I know there will be stories ahead to tell as well.