Off we go,into the wild blue yonder...

As many of you know, I have an older cousin named Amy. She moved here from California when I was five and since then we have had a joke about being twins. Amy began college while living with me and my siblings in my parents house. In an effort to avoid confusion, we were quickly labeled Big and Little. Here we are, years later, still answering to such titles. (Although she is no longer bigger than me.) Why does this matter? For most of my life, I've been answering to "Little". Though I am much older and much larger then she is, my five year old niece calls me Little as well as the older members of the family who were actually alive when I was dubbed "Little". This has never bothered me and still doesn't. In fact, I kind of like it. But in all those years when everyone was calling me Little, it never occurred to me that I might actually be small in the grand scheme of things. I always had a direction and I knew where I was going and how to get there. I had a lot of goals and some pretty high standards for myself in High School. I did all of it. Everything on the list got done and I had the time of my life doing it. Now I am here in college and I find myself suddenly in a much bigger pond, and much less sure of myself. I have had my fair share of doubts and fears and a whole lot of problems to face in my life so far, but I never actually felt little. Of course, I was never in the midst of seventeen thousand other students all doing the same things as me either. I don't have any particularly pressing problems with self-esteem, but it is a little disconcerting to look at your life and realize that you are perhaps less unique than you had believed. Most of the time, life is great. Really it is. I feel good about everything in my life. But I can't shake the feeling that there are more good things I want. I'm just not sure where to find it yet. But  I do believe in finding things out for yourself, so in my endeavor to search for these elusive good things still missing, I think a little self-reflection is in order, and to fill that order, I have decided to start a blog. As a very wise character in one of my favorite movies once said, " For eight months -no, more than that, a year- I sat in a cafe, I drank coffee, and I wrote nonsense in a journal. And then, somehow, it was not nonsense." That is a fairly accurate description of the goal here. I'm not sure what I am out to do but, as this woman said also, "It's only a place to start." Here I go.