Date: 2007-02-15
To: Prep #78--AAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!
Miles today: 0.0

I just felt like I needed to express the building anxiety. Actually, it's not that life is full of anymore "to do's" than normal, but when you have a deadline in which you know you will no longer be able to put things off....then suddenly this weird feeling appears in your chest...oh...say something like the feeling of a small elephant sitting on it?I've finally printed out a calendar of February and March and have written a never-ending task list of all of this little crap that I need to wrap up before leaving (IN 23 DAYS!!!!), and I'm assigning myself a few tasks each day/evening. Although I'm probably more organized than the average person, it still never fails that I'll feel uptight till have everything handled. I'll post a list of some of these little details later...because like I said before, I could never figure out why people seemed so rushed at the last moment, but I now see that there are a lot of things to tend to. As for the emotional journey, I'm just not believing yet that I'll be hiking in 25 days in Georgia. That all of these places and people and things I've been reading about for the past year will finally be my reality. I keep going outside in our -6 degree windchill (today...last week it was -25) and thinking, "By God!!! It had better be warmer in Georgia!!!!)As for Rachael, it hit her like a brick wall last week. Suddenly, all of the fears a family-member (I think) typically confronts came flowing out of her brain. Like..."I'm afraid you're going to die out there," and things like that. No matter how much you (as the hiker) think that you've educated your immediate family members about the culture and experiences others have had hiking the AT, there are going to be what we...who have been immersed in the whole thing for months and years, would consider to be seemingly irrational thoughts/fears coming out of both you and your family members' brains. I think it's normal. I don't mean "irrational" as in crazy either...just as in thoughts that you've already educated yourself and them about over and over...but nonetheless...they keep creeping back into your mind. What you're witnessing is the power of fear. Fear doesn't care if anything makes sense or if something is factual. Fear is just fear...a powerful emotional response to something that is happening in life, and it doesn't matter how much preparation or reading or talking you've done up to this point. I think fear is one of the last primal emotional responses that we continue experiencing as part of the food chain on Earth. It's one of the few emotions that can truely send you flighting or fighting, and it's an amazing process if you can actually recognize it when it's happening. Now...grasping onto the hooks of regained stability is the trick. Nicole and I have agreed that neither of us will fully take in what is happening until we're half way to Georgia....so if anyone sees a really cool economy rental car driving down the interstate and you see two women in the car with foam at the mouth, pale skin, sweat that is so abundant that the windows are steaming up like a sauna, and white eyes with pupils so small you can barely see them...you'll know that's us and you'll know reality finally found us. It's only a matter of time.