(no subject)

So I've been at school four days ... and the panic's come.  It hasn't fully set in because I've been holding it off through sheer force of will, but I've felt it hovering on the edge of my mind from the moment we drove onto campus.

And just ... I hate it.  Not just because my own panic scares me more than anything else in the world, but because it just doesn't make sense.  I was trying to explain it to my roommate last night because the thing is, I never panicked in Scotland.  Not once.  I was on the other side of the world, and I had no friends, and school didn't make an ounce of sense, but I never panicked.  I mean, I was failing school, and there were nights when I went to bed hungry, and I was lonelier than I'd ever been in my life (which is saying a lot), but ... I slept at night; I didn't cry; I was happy.  And that logically makes no sense at all.

I mean, here I can go to class and know what's going on (usually); here I have people who actually care about me; here I'm not completely on my own.  But here I panic.  I was telling my roommate how, emotionally, Scotland was really good for me because "it kept me stable and it kept me sane."  And then I paused and said, "Or maybe it kept me delusional."  Because the truth is that Scotland was the first place since I came to college that I didn't feel homesick.  And it took me nearly the whole semester to work out why, but one day it finally all clicked into place:

In Scotland I was so far removed from everything that I was able to tell myself that at the end of it all I could go home.  And here I just know that's not true.  I can't lie to myself in Texas because I see all my stuff in that unfamiliar house; and here I can't lie to myself because I grew up fairly close to my school, so when I'm here I know what I lost.  And I know that I can't go home because there is no home.

And so the panic sets in.  And I hate it.