Every Little Thing...is Gonna be Alright.

Single girls can blur the line between "blissfully self-aware" and "obsessive" pretty quick. Myself included.

Trust me on this. As a single girl, you often find yourself with a seemingly endless amount of free time on your hands. No matter how busy and full your life is, with friends and family and goals and good times, a lot of the time you are--let's face it--flying solo. That may mean a movie marathon on a weekend afternoon with a copious amount of Kettle Chips and Rice Dream and absolutely no one to answer to. Or it could translate into a long visit to the quiet room of the library to get that novel (one day, fingers crossed) a few steps closer to completion. You don't have a boyfriend or husband or kids to answer to. Save for work, your time is your own. And life, for the most part, is all about you.

As a really independent person, I'm ok with this. I don't mind being by myself. I actually enjoy my own company and can keep myself entertained with absolutely no problems. Translation: I have a fun and happy life; I'm enjoying my single years; I predict looking back on them fondly when I am married and have a baby. I'm not a chick that wants to be in a relationship just to be in a relationship. Should a great male enter the picture and my status change from "single" to "spoken for", great. But until then, I'm livin' large and having fun.

That said, even with the best of intentions, if a single girl is left to her own devices for too long, she can fall prey to making it all way too much about her. And before long, she only sees things from a very narrow and self-centric perspective.

Example: when that guy I'm interested in doesn't email me back on Facebook I quickly feel slighted, blow it up in my head to being completely undesirable and wonder what I said or did that was so terribly wrong to get the snub. (At these times my inner dialogue eventually wises up and sounds something like this: Calm down, delusional. He's probably just busy. Back away slowly from the status updates and log off for a bit). Or if a colleague with kids suddenly breaks a lunch date at the last minute I feel put out and inconvenienced. (Easy there, headcase. The world does not revolve around you--Junior most likely has a sore throat and needs some help from your friend, the Mom. You can get Thai food together another time). See? In both cases, my perspective rushes in a rapid sprint towards the outermost end of the "it's-all-about-me" spectrum. It's out of whack and focused obsessively inward.

Yes, too much time to mull things over can prove to be just... too much.

Lately I had found myself, a self-admittedly happy-to-be-me singleton, steering dangerously close to this type of behavior and on a pretty regular basis, too. Though I would hear echoes from an old Oprah Winfrey show in my head, where she urged the audience to be their "best self" as she enthusiastically pumped her fists towards the sky, I couldn't act accordingly. I would find myself feeling slighted. I would obsess about small and petty things when I absolutely knew better. I would not just "get over it" and move on. Best self? I found myself sometimes skimming the line near the worst.
Of course at the root of this kind of me-me-me behavior is something that single girls are secretly afraid to admit: A deep-seated fear that because they are single and don't have a boyfriend or husband or kids to answer to, that they are now easily forgettable by most. That they don't fit into their friends' lives anymore because they are not at the same phase, too. Where others in their circles have moved on to experience births and kiddie birthday parties and wedding anniversaries and couples getaways that fill their days, the single girl without all of that is suddenly, though not intentionally, the odd woman out. She's trying her best. But she's kind of like a crayon in a box of markers--still capable of creating something just as beautiful but, at the present, possessing different tools than her friends with which to work with.

So she leans inward and focuses on herself, the one person who is always there. She creates a rich life on her own and colors her own pictures. Sometimes she strikes the right balance and the colors work. And others may marvel at the art of her happy single girl life. But sometimes she just can't strike that balance. She ends up overcompensating towards the wrong end of the spectrum. And she obsesses in one way or another about something minimal to quietly overcome her own often unvoiced fears of being forgotten or the odd woman out. Others around her may once again notice the colors and perhaps even like them. But inside, clutching those crayons, she can often feel like she's just one big, hot mess.

I recently had the opportunity to advise a group of 14 Villanova students on a mission trip to Kingston, Jamaica. I was lucky enough to experience service trips while I was an undergrad there and wanted to be of service in this way again. I also had never done an international service trip and was just plain curious.

But on a more personal note, I had other goals for this excursion, too. In short, I wanted to get over myself. I wanted to focus on remembering those who truly had been forgotten in some way and not in the small way that I had been so focused on lately. I wanted, more than anything, to gain some much-needed perspective. I kept coming up short in this department and knew I needed to do something drastic to change that. Going to a third-world country to do service alongside 14 people I hadn't even met? Bingo.

So what happens when a single girl with nothing but time on her hands and deep thoughts in her head collides with the sights, sounds and souls of Kingston, Jamaica for a week? And what kind of lessons did I learn? Stay tuned to find out...