Square

People often say that when you serve abroad, it changes your life. That wasn't entirely true for me. I was 28 years old the first time I ventured out of the country. I was a single mom in the throws of one of the most difficult chapters of my life when I received that phone call asking me to go to China. With every reason to stay home and sort through the mess around me, I said maybe, which of course meant yes. 

I couldn't say no. It wasn't that I was brave or had great faith or anything admirable, it was beyond my control. Destiny was calling me, pulling me out of the ordinariness. I had stuffed myself into an unnatural shape for far too long. I belonged somewhere else. I was meant to go. It didn't matter where at the time, I just knew I had to do it. 

I was a square peg forcing myself into this round hole of my surroundings, surviving on shallow breaths. My sharp edges blistered over and over refusing to callous and conform to its setting, never getting use to its confines. And so that phone call was like a a rope ladder being thrown down into that round hole of my life, giving me a chance to climb out and breath, to stretch my square frame in the open space of the world.

Yes, it hurt, and it reopened old wounds climbing out, but it didn't matter because I was free to take my own shape for the first time as I ventured to the other side of the world. No, I didn't come home from that trip a changed person. I came home from that trip bandaged and bruised. Satisfied this time because I would never force myself back in to that hole