Life Post: Preparing to Leave

Wow, it's been a long time since I've written one of these. Considering I'm in the midst of preparing for the biggest move of my life, though, I thought I should give a brief update.

Recently, I have posted two phone vlogs on Youtube that mention a bit of what has been going on. While I usually post my videos here as well, I didn't with those purely because they were uploaded from my phone and I just didn't take the extra step of sharing them to the blog. Since I plan to more or less say what I said in those videos here, I won't bother with those now, but I'll try to get better about it in the future.

I've had my Japanese visa for a while, as well as my plane ticket and all of the other necessary paperwork. Currently, the only thing left for me to do is pack all my stuff up and say goodbye to everyone. Packing is an ongoing process as I try to sort through what I'll take and what I won't. From the beginning, I planned to take very little with me, but I keep having moments of worry where I think that maybe I should take a certain item after all.

The biggest source of stress, however, is my carry-on. I'll only have access to my carry-on during the week of training, and I'm not sure I can fit all of the clothes I need in it (and I'm not talking about an entire week's worth of clothes). That's currently my biggest challenge, but I'll make it work.

When my visa came, it became much more real that I was moving to Japan, but it still felt far away. Last night I had a moment where it truly hit me how soon I'll be leaving. Today, though, it's like that reality has faded a bit, and once again it feels far away despite my departure being only a week away.

I'm incredibly excited but also nervous. Funnily enough, my current nervousness comes largely from a fear that something will happen with my luggage. (Not packing the right stuff, it getting lost, etc.) I'm sure I'll get nervous about plenty of other things as they happen, but I also think how excited I am will outweigh most of that.

I really can't believe it's next week.