I am really getting anxious now. There has been lots of planning and talking and getting ready for this project, but I am still in the city. I am done with cites and large groups of strangers and a general lack of nature. I haven’t had a relationship or interaction with a non-domestic animal in weeks. It’s getting so bad I have to go to the park to see trees. I sit there and watch all the dogs interacting just to get a tiny fix. The feeling of being cooped up in the city is like having a nervous itch. I walk around with this itch and know the only way to scratch it will be to get out in the bush. I can feel myself creating distance between me and my friends and family and everyone around me. The more uncomfortable I get, the more introverted I become. All this while, I am sitting wondering what the lions I meet are going to be like.

Every time I sit down to write, I want to start with “It’s almost time to go.” I’ve been sitting around feeling like life is on hold until I get out to meet my lions. When you live a lifestyle like mine, you are always about to leave. Sometimes in days and sometimes in months, but you are always about to leave. Not that I’m complaining, but at times that feeling overwhelms you and makes it impossible to do any of the usual things that one might do. There is no need to buy that bookshelf to put your books away or hang those paintings; it’s pointless to date someone that you see a future with, because in the end you are leaving.

The thing that I find most interesting about my preparations to go is the mental relationship I feel like I have with a pride of lions that I don’t even know. I know all the stats — i.e., I know how big they are, how many male and female, where they live, and so on — but I don’t know them. So every day I wonder what each one will be like and worry if they are going to like me. It feels almost like I am in the second grade and am changing schools.

I guess it’s odd, but my largest responsibility to prepare for this project is to be ready for an attack. I spend hours every day in the gym working out to fight off an attack. I spend hours a day planning for the “what if” scenarios, but my biggest hope is that I am accepted and liked.

Well, that’s it, it finally happened. I had my first panic attack of the project. I was up all night last night freaking out about lions. I expected to get panic attacks, because in the past during dangerous projects I have had the same. It’s funny, I am always asked if I’m scared with the animals and generally speaking I never am. It’s usually after I am in a dangerous situation that I start thinking about the things that could happen and that causes me to get scared. It seems now that I am a bit older, and much more experienced, I can get my mind into those terrible “what if” situations without ever being in one. Too much knowledge is sometimes a bad thing.

If I had to explain my panic attack, I would call it a partial mental breakdown. I say partial because the whole time that I was absolutely gripped and crushed by the fear of what I have gotten myself into, I knew and even verbally told myself “When I wake up tomorrow, it will all be fine.” When I did, it was.

This project is based so much on my confidence. When I get face to face with one of the world’s best predators, I have to know in my head that I can deal with it. That confidence is based on years of experience, and a mind that can focus on a goal in such a way that every detail has been contemplated and accounted for 100 times.

These panic attacks go straight for my confidence. The minute I think that I may not have trained hard enough, figured out a good-enough plan or know enough, or even if I lose faith in the very essence that I believe all animals operate on, that’s when the whole house of cards falls down. That’s when I start to think that a project like this is going to be the end of me. That will be when I pack up and go home.

Thankfully, I feel better.

I saw pictures today of where I might set up camp. Holy cow! I’m so excited that it’s almost here — I almost get to start this journey. I have been planning this since before Christmas. I am short of breath, I am so excited!

That, and I have a cold.