Is This The Real Life?

I've been (somewhat unofficially) accepted into my top PhD program! I received an email "congratulating me again" for my acceptance when that was the first I'd heard of any final decision. I waited a day or so to send an email asking what was the deal and got a response on Sunday that I had indeed been accepted and should be receiving mail within the next couple days. I still don't have any mail and I feel like my correspondence with my possibly-soon-to-be advisor is being put on hold until I get solid confirmation and hopefully word also from the other school to which I applied. All of my former professors told me that I need to visit the campuses before I make a final decision, but all I seem to want to do is just give a big resounding YES so that it is a done deal and I can start some serious planning. I am still not sure how to approach this with the program - what do I say next? I'm sure I will figure it out, as I've felt in the dark this entire process about communicating anyhow.

Honestly, this acceptance doesn't feel like a big deal, even though I KNOW it is, even though it was not something I could have imagined happening to me despite all of my hard work. I got into a PhD program!! It doesn't feel real and at the same time I am waiting for it all to blow up in my face. Driving home the other night, I had this overwhelming thought that something will have to go wrong for this to go right and at the time I thought I knew what that would be. I feel very burdened worrying for and assuring two minds that this move will be fabulous. A piece of my heart still lies in the desert and I know I will have no trouble finding it again - no matter what. I have pieces of myself spread out in many nooks of this world and I hope to keep finding places where my heart explodes in the abstraction that defines any given place. I've also surrendered a piece of myself to another soul and feel quite vulnerable in the stochasticity and comfort of such a fleshy depository. Maybe the solution is to move those feelings into reserves, to the same place where the desert and where Finland now reside and where the Eastern Shore will reside soon.

An adventure awaits me, a bonafied independent existence. Who am I kidding? I am absolutely thrilled. I guess my biggest fear is that I will lose that thrill or get my hopes too high and never make it out of here or to the life of discovery I've always dreamed of. Lord knows, I've tried to cut my path so many times, in so many ways, through so many places. It's all gotten me to here though and you better believe I'm going to run!