Sometimes I really am Eustace.

The first taste of freedom is always the sweetest.

Last Tuesday, May 27th, I moved out of what has become an increasingly toxic and destructive environment with little more than a quarter-tank of gas, the clothes on my back, five bucks in my pocket, and a wing and a prayer.

I was more than a little apprehensive, for although spontaneity is one of my most prominent (and some would say most insufferable) traits, strong follow-through is not. And in this particular instance, I could not afford to lose faith, to give up, to wuss out. Too much was riding on it.

And so I left, and in less than a week of a nomad's existence, I have discovered a great many things. The first, and perhaps the most important, is a principle that is now etched upon my soul: that I am loved, beyond measure; that, in the words of Victor Hugo, "the supreme happiness in life is the conviction that we are loved -- loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves." Mustering up the humility to admit that you are in a tight spot and need a couch to crash on is made a little easier to bear when you are surrounded by as many incredible friends as I have had the good fortune to accumulate over the years. If I ever again feel the throes of cynicism or the temptation to lose faith in humanity coming on, I will remember these days as the week in which I discovered that, a la George Bailey, no man is a failure who has friends.

Secondly, though, I have realized that most of us are a great deal more competent and capable than we dare to think we are -- that that which seems most difficult and unattainable is actually, more often than not, quite within our grasp, provided we have the courage and wherewithal to seek after it.

Thirdly, I have realized that there are an enormous amount of character flaws and foibles, diabolical pet sins, and atrocious habits, which I have shelved and avoided the unpleasant reality of confronting for some time, and which the time is now ripe for tackling. I may not enjoy it -- I imagine I won't -- and like Eustace in Voyage of the Dawn Treader, will be forced to undergo the wrenching but necessary transformation of having my scales torn away by loving claws, but the unpleasantness or difficulty is not really the point. The time to be happy, to learn to love life again, to be the woman that I was called to be, is now. I sit on the threshold of a new and greater adventure, and while it is far easier to wallow in your own self-pity than to get up off your ass and do something about it it, it is only in the Doing Something that anything may be achieved at all.

"Get busy living, or get busy dying." And it's the living that takes a hell of a lot more courage.