“Longing for the unknown but harboring a fear of leaving my comfort zone.”
I’m from a small-ish town in South Arkansas called Hot Springs. I grew up encouraged to love people and fear God. In my family you are encouraged to work hard, play harder, and whatever you do, if it’s dangerous, just don’t tell Mama. We like to travel, we adore our pets. I lost my mom when I was eight years old but I am confident that my daddy, my aunts, my grandma and my big bro all helped to raise me just as she would have wanted.
I’m passionate about music, but when I was in junior high I did what no one expected and chose athletics over choir. My high school coach took me from a less than average athlete to a halfway decent runner and I took my running career up to Arkansas State University.
As I was approaching the end of college, I found myself thinking often, “Wait, what the heck do I do now?” I spent four years studying Creative Media Production. (It’s okay if you don’t know what that is, most people don’t. I studied film, theatre, writing, etc.) I spent four years on a D1 Cross Country team. (This means that my entire social life was determined for me; my friends, my weekends, my evenings and most certainly my mornings.) And I spent four years in the same town where my rent was covered by my scholarship. (This means everything I earned from a job was mine to play with.)
Life was dang good. It is not lost on me that I was able to escape college in the minimum four years with a bachelor’s degree and zero debt. But as my graduation approached I realized that after four years trying to figure out what to do with my life I still didn’t have an answer. Yikes.
“What the heck do I do now?” is a question I’m still pondering. And I’m no closer to an answer now than I was a year and a half ago.
What do I WANT to do? I don’t really know the answer to that either. I like to write, hence the blog. I like interacting with people. I like to travel. I like my dog. But as far as I know I can’t make ‘hanging out with my dog and writing’ a career. Not one that pays very well anyway. I have the first half of that down though.
I’ll explain.
For the time being, I work for a company called Gearhead Outfitters. Gearhead is an outdoor gear and apparel shop, still family owned, and expanding out of their home state of Arkansas. I started working for Gearhead while I was in college and I stuck around because of that whole ‘I don’t know what to do with my life yet’ thing.
Lucky for me, they granted my wish not only to start working full-time, but to move my work to their Springfield, Missouri location where my boyfriend was managing their store. After a couple of months working together, we decided to adopt a puppy. This is how I make a living ‘hanging out with my dog.’ Kona gets to come to work with us every single day.
I’d been in Springfield a year when Gearhead decided to open a store in Tulsa, OK.
We jumped at a new opportunity and moved our little family (Jackson, myself, and Kona) to Tulsa. We live in a great little house, right across the street from a park, and a short walk from some of Tulsa’s best restaurants, coffee, etc. I go to work every day with the man I love. And we get to take our dog with us.
I know, I know; this sounds like a dream. And please believe me when I say I am truly grateful for the life I’ve been given. But this blog isn’t about a perfect and wonderful life and how to achieve it. I wouldn’t know anything about that.
I still have that feeling, that question rolling around in my head…. “What now?”
What is the next challenge? What is my next goal? Where will I go? How will I chase my dreams? What ARE my dreams?
I long for adventure. I crave it.
I want to see the world. I want to meet cool people. I want to do wild, crazy things. But let’s be honest. Travel costs money. Adventure demands risks.
I am so COMFORTABLE in the life I’ve lived. I am caught in-between what I have always known and what I long for. “My fear is rooted in the distance that lies between my comfort and my desire.”
I started this blog because the more people I meet, and the more conversations we have about life and growing up, the more I think that we all feel this way. There are so many of us confused about what we want, unsure about what the future holds, and lingering on that question ‘What now?’
So I figured it was worth writing about. In hopes that even one person feels better after reading the content here, we’re going to produce it.
My hope is that this blog is inspirational in the stories it tells and informational in the content provided. We don’t have ANYTHING figured out. Not life, not travel, not adventure. But we like those things so we’re going to do our best to share our thoughts on them in hopes that everyone reading realizes that it’s okay to be in-between. Just make the best of it.