Meghan: "Anticipation"

Tonight is the night before I leave for Miami. In six hours, I will be waking up early with my parents to groggily drive to the airport and say good-bye. 

On the eve of this much-anticipated day, I can’t decide if I want it to come or not. The fact that I was actually going to participate in DukeEngage this summer became real during Duke Engage Academy. Since the academy, I’ve been anxious and excited, but now that tomorrow is almost here, I feel myself holding back a little. 

Whenever I greatly anticipate something—a holiday, seeing an important person, the end of a semester, the waiting is the longest part. Then I experience the shear enjoyment of experiencing the event—not really knowing how to document its occurrence properly, and then it’s over. And it slips away to the mix of other exciting events for which I develop anticipation. I’ve always felt like time goes by a little too quickly and have struggled with ways to properly appreciate and document my experiences as they occur. 

I have a feeling that the next two months of my life are going to be ones I don’t want to fly by and ones I want to document properly. That is something of which I am going into this experience very cognizant. People who have experienced Duke Engage have expressed that while doing it, the experience feels incredible and life changing, but if you aren’t careful it will slip away once it is over. I don’t want that to happen, and that is why I wait on this night—not being able to decide if I want morning to come as fast or as slow as possible.

However, regardless of whether it comes slow or fast, it is coming, and ultimately I am very excited. I still don’t know what my daily routine will be or what I really will be doing, but I have a feeling I will be learning a lot. 

I love being thrown into new environments because I know I will have to adjust the way I do things—a process that typically leads to a lot of self-discovery. Aside from starting a new kind of life for the next couple of months, I am nervously excited to meet so many new people. This is the first time I will have the opportunity to use Spanish in a real life setting, and I am slightly unsure of my ability but am ready to try all the same. 

I want to go into this experience judgment free and enter into a partnership with the people I will encounter, but I am also anxious that they might misinterpret why I am there. I want them to know how genuinely excited I am and how much this means and how much I want to learn, but I’m not quite sure how to convey that yet. 

So tonight, as I sit at my kitchen table for the last time for a couple months, I am anxious yet very excited about the summer I have been anticipating.

-Meghan Price