Is it telling that my successes frighten me much, much more than do my failures?

I'm going to go to Northwestern this summer to participate in the nanotechnology REU. It's kind of a big deal. I'm really excited. It's good.

But I'm also terrified. This is something huge and new. This is moving away from home and meeting new people again and being given a new professor and new research. They'll tell me what I need to know.

It's just that Chicago is so far away from Syracuse, New York where I work for my organic professor and have a lab on the third floor, the yellow floor, that smells like ethyl acetate and vanillin and has a door that slams really loudly when you don't stand by it and ease it closed. Where I know the people I need to know and I sometimes run around like a crazy person between Baker and Jahn and get dry ice and talk to Marlene and run gigantic columns and mutter to myself the whole time.

Like I said: new. And things change, and I need to learn to adapt to change less tumultuously. And it's so cool that I get to do this and that they dump money into my lap so I can do it and I get to work with experts in a place that specializes in nanotechnology.

And I finally feel like I did people proud. My life should not be about accomplishing things for other people, so I hope this is for me a little, too, but I finally feel like I measured up to what other people think of me. Which is also weird because not only am I not holding that proverbial measuring tape, I am also not judging myself to award myself anything. So my hands are proverbially tied, right?

It's been a good year.

This is going to be a dry run for grad school.

I'm so relieved. I'm also really scared.