I'm here- Somewhere between PA and the Amalfi Coast

In ten days, I’ll be waking up in my bedroom for the last time until mid-December. It’ll be my last time waking up in the only country I have ever known until mid-December. In eleven days, I’ll be waking up on a plane that has just flown over the Atlantic Ocean, that is if I get any sleep. In twelve days, I’ll be waking up in a hotel room in Milan after a trip to France the day before. And, in twenty days, I’ll be waking up in my new dorm room in Sorrento Italy next to the Bay of Naples and my two friends from Pennsylvania who will make it feel not so far from home.  

I’ve always wanted to get out but never really knew how, so when the opportunity to study abroad came along I had to take it and not look back. It was fun to make the Pinterest board full of girls having their perfect European summers and to plan out all of the places I would travel to, but now I’m realizing that everyone else’s life is still moving exactly as mine once was which is a hard realization to come to. My friends from school are packing up to head back to a campus I won’t see until the spring, reminding me of all the faces that I will no longer see. My boyfriend is no longer just a two hour drive away but an eight hour flight and six hour time difference. I can’t come home for holidays so I’ll miss out on pumpkin spice coffee, the leaves a deep maroon, and mashed potatoes at the Thanksgiving table. It seems trivial to be sad ten days before my four-month-long trip to the Amalfi Coast, but every time I see an airplane, my heart sinks to the bottom of the ocean and its beat rises like the cabin is already rapidly losing air. At least I’ll have the beach, gelato, and plenty of wine.  

I have good days and bad days dealing with this shift and on the good days, I feel like I’m finally making the jump into the reality that I want to live in. I can see myself thriving in a coffee shop, drinking espresso on the side of a cobblestone street built in ancient times and thinking of how many people have ever stepped foot on them. I’ll be taking classes and I’ll have an internship where I’ll be writing on a blog, About Sorrento, which makes the dream I’ve had since I was a kid into a reality. I hope every little thing inspires me and that I’ll have stories I can publish for years forward, plus the ones I’ll keep reserved for my future kids’ bedtime.  

Apart from being a writer, I have always had dreams of starting a career in content creation out of the same love for capturing the moment. Recently things have been building up in that aspect with more brand partnerships, TikTok shop content creation, and receiving pr, commissions, and monetary compensation. I feel like this is the perfect time for this all to start happening as soon all I’ll want to do is share my perspective with the world, even more than I already do. I have been making an income from social media freelancing for over three years so this is a side project I have been working on for a while and now I want to merge it with my Lost in Thought community as well. I can feel this side of my career begin to take off in sync with all the abundance that’s about to enter my life. All this happening at once is making me rethink my life entirely. I have been writing on this blog for over five years on and off throughout high school and college. It is what made me realize that I wanted to go to school for creative writing and that I love the communications and pr aspects as well, which I want to be doing for the rest of my life. I keep this blog sort of on the backburner but it really does drive me tremendously as I mention it in every job interview to show all the skills it has taught me and the love I have for this field. I am two years away from post-grad and I feel like I need to start taking this side of my future career more seriously as well as the hunt for a stable job.  

I am going to link all of my socials here so I can start to merge these two communities I have started to build: https://linktr.ee/emmaclaireritter  

Thank you as always for reading! This is a short and rather scattered post today, but an important one because hopefully soon I will be having lots to tell you all about during my travels in Italy! I am super grateful that fourteen-year-old me decided to risk getting made fun of in school for a stupid little blog because here I am five and a half years later still writing on it and my life is completely different, as well as completely awesome. Soon I’ll be writing on a real blog in another country so that shows you how far a little dream can go 😊 

-Emma Claire