I am not a rational being. I've always known this and I've never really regretted it. The past thirty years have been a fairly continual process of self-discovery as I figured out what makes me tick (my mother seemed less than pleased yesterday when she said a child would be a good tool for this and I retorted "so would a prison sentence or joining the Marines"). Having recently tattooed "Fortune favors the bold" on my chest is also an argument against rationality, since boldness and logic rarely go hand-in-hand.

The past few days I've been particularly irrational, although I prefer to think of myself as intuitive. There's a reason I'm an iNtuitive Feeler in Myers-Briggs, as opposed to Sensing and Thinking. Whichever way I choose to spin it, my decision process is a bit twisted. I very consciously do what most people do unconsciously; I determine a course of action and then try to justify it. This works fantastically well until I start to question my initial judgment. When I have doubts about myself then they automatically trickle down into the decisions I have made, since I know that those decisions were based more on my desires than any actual evidence.

I've been really abstract so far because there were three or four areas that this applied to at some point this week. Then last night I started to apply it to Italy. Not the trip I'm about to begin, which I'm extremely excited about, but the second trip next summer. Were my assumptions valid? Are my goals realistic? Is it a fools' errand?

So I did what I had done when I first decided to go - I made a spreadsheet. And I proceeded to show myself that every "logical" step that I had used to justify the trip financially was not only valid, but fairly conservative. It turns out that an off-the-cuff idea has a really sound basis in evidence.

Once I'd done that, I realized that all the doubts and fears that had been manifesting over the past few days were all part of the same general trend. Once I could see the trend it was broken, and this is a very good thing.