Enthusiasm

I am going to wait till my mother’s birthday, in a few days, and then I am going to make a decision about where to go, and it might be Central America (since I was thinking last time I was there how remarkably easy it would be to take a beach vacation in the winter, but I wasn’t exactly thinking October… and it’s sad because I haven’t been to the beach at all, all year). It might be South America. I can’t even say right now but whether I am here or there I think maybe I am going to feel just as lonely.

Central America versus South America depends on how much tolerance I have for uncertainty and, having no other place to stay here, the idea of just heading off to the airport and ending up in a place I have never been is scary. So I might opt for something familiar though I honestly don’t really know anything. Spanish makes me happy, most of the time, Latin America makes me happy (Spain makes me happy), travel in general makes me happy, but have I lost it, my enthusiasm, my reason for caring about all this stuff?

I saw I had a message at some point from my high school Spanish teacher (that is probably nothing new to get excited about) and the truth is the most grounding time of my life when I was most confident in the possibility of some kind of stable future was when he was inculcating me with optimism and curiosity about travel and about the world. People might not like you, but so what… the advice he would have given me is the advice I could use now.

I still come back into this delight when I get into Spanish and it brings me so much back to that time when I had someone to speak in Spanish to all the time while being silly and weird and just myself and a lot of that had to do with the grounding influence my Spanish teacher had on me. For me he was just the kind if person you wanted to be around, and I got to be around him, lucky me. I really want to be around people it feels really good to be around, people who are inspiring to he around, and… I don’t know when that will happen again. If I were feeling at all sociable I’d say I might find that in Latin America but I am feeling so introverted and I don’t know if I’ll meet people no matter how good my Spanish might get. I wish I had some kind of grounded community back ‘home’ somewhere that could be excited with me about my travels and everything because doing whatever I’m doing alone sure is lonely and I’m not sure what I’m doing anymore.

And now I just don’t know what I have become and even with languages I’m not sure if that is what I am meant to be passionate about and I am so in my head about it, I guess, because you are passionate about what you are passionate about, you know, but without friends to share what you are passionate about it can be really lonely and sad. I don’t quite want to see if immersing myself in Spanish will cheer me up at all. I am afraid of hitting a wall and discovering the mere joy of speaking doesn’t delight me anymore, or discovering I have lost my enthisiasm for everything.