And So It Begins...

"Life" has been a keyword for me over the past half year, and I've had to really work on this whole aspect of --living-- recently.

Where to begin?  If you do know me, you're pretty aware of what massive life changes have happened.  If not, let me give you the Reader's Digest version:
1.  I ended my relationship of four years with my husband (we had only been married six months) after realizing how abusive he was to me.
2.  I took a three week trip to Israel in December/January which led to...
3.  Deciding to move my life to Be'er Sheva, Israel via immigrating which led to...
4.  Deciding to go to grad school at Ben Gurion University for my Masters in Social Work...
5.  Which finds me here, in April, two months away from leaving and processing a lot of emotions, fears, and desires.

So, I decided to write about this process.  The frustrations of immigrating to a new country with such a distinct character and "Israeli" way of doing things.  The fear of leaving my parents and my stability.  The heartfelt desire to be in a country so close to my heart, living the true Zionist dream.  The realization of how far I have come in the past six months to simply be me again.

Great, now I'm crying.  But, as my dear friend Liran told me, emotional writing is "the best kind of writing."  He's definitely right, and he's pursuing his own amazing social experiment which you should check out here.

And he has now effectively distracted me from this first blog post by discussing, in depth, what my name should be in Israel, since Megan is very hard to transliterate appropriately.  I'll share our discussion at a later time.  :-)

Thanks for choosing to come on this journey with me.  It'll be full of laughs, for sure, with some tears of joy and some screams of frustration and anguish along the way. 

I'll leave you with a beautiful song by an Israeli artistic group, the Idan Raichel Project, that just about sums it all up.  This is the best I could find - it doesn't quite do the song justice!