What now?

"Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit." Edward Abbey explains why I feel most alive when I'm out there in the trees.

A photo posted by Amanda (@mandalyn93) on May 2, 2016 at 11:38am PDT

Holy schneikes. I'm embarking on the final week at my job and realizing what is ahead of me.

This summer is going to be crazy.

For starters, I'm going to spend a month in Tulsa for the Teach for America summer institute. I'm going to be spending a week in Ecuador on a mission trip. I'm going to spend nearly two weeks on a Midwest train trip. And, to cap it all off, I have to take a huge standardized test and complete a 45-hour online course before the end of May.

I will be home, at my apartment in Phoenix, for three weeks total in the next three months. That's really hard for me to process. I'm not a homebody, per se, but I like having a physical location to come back to and drop things off at.

On the other hand, I've spent time traveling and housesitting and living out of a backpack, so this is nothing new--it's just something I didn't expect myself to be doing so much of this summer.

The more I think about it, my apprehension and anxiousness is replaced by curiosity and excitement.

In six months from now, I will have grown so much I'll probably be an entirely different person.

• I will have lived in a city where I don't know a single soul (albeit only for a month and a week).
• I will have gone through an effective yet condensed training program and placed in a classroom as a teaching intern. 
• I will (hopefully) have been accepted to and started grad school at ASU. 
• I will have stopped draining my savings and relying on my credit card and finally will have a paycheck after going all summer without one. 

And yet, I'm still asking myself...

What am I doing?

I don't know.

But it's certainly going to be a grand adventure.