Readiness tastes like Hawkeye vodka. With each ping pong ball that bounced off the table and onto the concrete floor varnished with years of spilled booze, I felt more and more ready to leave. Ready to leave the game, the house, the cheap lemonade mixed with cheaper liquor, the college scene.

I had waited for the moment of grandeur. I would probably be wearing some fancy outfit at the time, and “Run The World” by Beyoncé would be playing in the background. But my post-grad readiness emerged at a “Flannel and Handles” party in the cramped basement of the PiKapp house, red solo cup of Hawkeye lemonade in my hand. Readiness is subtle like that.

In the spirit of my upcoming half-marathon, I’ve been meditating once again on readiness and how it manifests in the grown-up realm, one without the rigidity of semesters punctuated by pseudo-breaks and final-exam mayhem. Without the expected milestones, the checking off of another semester, the counting down to graduation, readiness has again taken on that innate subtlety.

Readiness looks like the latest “miracle” half-marathon plan in my running magazine, each iteration promising the PR time, the quick recovery, the invincibility. The chart is neat, orderly and, for me, stripped of the emotional element of readiness, the one that can throw me into a spell of fanatic overexertion followed by paralyzing inertia.

In eight months of training, I’ve controlled not the mileage but the emotion, pining desperately for that feeling of readiness, some celestial “You can do it!” With every additional mile, I added new views of Des Moines to my fragmented internal photo album, 801 Grand’s towering frame peeking out from behind the canopy of Water Works Park. More mileage meant more new perspectives of my city, which meant I was more ready for 13.1. Or something like that.

Eventually my mental photo book gave way to the real thing as I paused to capture my next mile, next view. Flipping through photos of the fading skyline, I wanted to feel ready. Creating tangible evidence of my progress, of the eight-month half-marathon journey, would quantify, validate and prove my readiness.

The thing I forgot about readiness is it simply happens. It happens not in filtered photos, on planned running routes or to my mild dismay, with Beyoncé’s “Run The World” playing in the background. It happens in damp frat-house basements with the sound of late-night laundry, wayward ping pong balls and “Shots! Shots! Shots! Everybody!” in the background.

After eight months, a mere 15 days of my half-marathon training remain, and I don’t feel ready. It’s OK. I’ve stopped relying on the skyline to guide my sense of progress, and I assure you I won’t indulge in a red solo cup of Hawkeye lemonade (bless my post-grad drinking standards).

But come October 18, I hope readiness tastes like a cheap, post-race Coors Light.

Blank pages comfort me. It’s something I never thought I’d say. The pressure of college deadlines erased the freedom of blank pages for a few years, paragraphs often sheared or stretched, tweaked or tortured to fit the word count, the required structure — something.

Since graduating, I’ve found renewed writerly peace, strangely, in blank and inked pages alike, each providing a sense of comfort etched at opposite ends of the innovation spectrum. Earlier this week, I had the afternoon off work, so I spent it at Ephemera, my favorite stationery store in Des Moines’ East Village, and Central Library.

The stationery store is a source of confidence, each blank postcard quietly calling, “Hey there, Writer. You’ve got things to say. Say them!” An assortment of empty cards and notebooks form a wobbly stack atop my bookshelf, their empty pages a reminder that there is always, thankfully, something to say.

That premise can, of course, be dangerous, which is where the library comes in. It’s appropriate that the books are enclosed in a semi-transparent, gold façade, the reflective panels inviting me while lending the building an intimidating grandeur. The library is a polite reminder that it’s OK to have confidence as a writer, but it’s equally important to read, to inhabit others’ stories and selves, shaping my own in the forver-humbling process.

My apartment, fittingly, is almost exactly halfway between the stationery boutique and the library. Every day, I strive for writing that strikes a balance between inspiration from the memoirists and autobiographers whose books are permanently anchored below the cup of tea on my coffee table (don’t worry, there’s a coaster) and the blank pages perched a tad greedily on the shelf, each giving me an overzealous writerly pep talk.

Somewhere in the middle, as I teeter between caution and confidence, the page transforms from blank to black and white.

I ran to heal, I claimed. It was a neat, tidy motivation, one I could tuck in my mind like I tuck my key in my shoelace. Committing to the half marathon would help me get over a failed relationship while providing a new milestone, something flashy to cloak raging feelings of inadequacy, something shiny to brandish when asked, “What’s new?”

Running is the constant, physical manifestation of moving forward, I theorized; therefore, my mind and emotions would follow the same progressive path. When I crossed the finish line in October, I would be healed.

But in the tired delirium of being trapped in my brain for up to three hours over 13-some miles of pavement, I found myself anchored not to the glittery, “What’s new?”-worthy future but to the past. I ran forward, reciting entire conversations in my mind, the ones I deleted from my phone but couldn’t erase from memory, the impact of my shoes creating a disjointed beat; I slid into madness even as I made physical progress.

During the particularly tough mileage days, I found myself breathlessly mumbling strings of jumbled sentences, something like, “You can do it, three more miles, I hate you, why couldn’t you have kept me around, there might be a bug in my eye, don’t say things you don’t mean, don’t say you want to stay friends, why the hell did you register for the half.”

As the training runs have stretched on, I’ve learned to dedicate each mile to one thought, idea or regret, throwing my whole body and mind into its fitful rumination, contemplation and eventually, meaningful reflection.

Sometimes I even manage to sneak in an A-ha! moment or epiphany — something new to tuck in my shoelace.

My fear has grown up with me. At times it is 13-year-old Taylor at the eighth-grade scary-movie sleepover, then the emblem of rebellion, with “The Silence of the Lambs” playing. My bowl of M&M’s is scattered across the shag carpet in my friend Katie’s basement. I sketch invisible lines from candy to candy, weaving my own invisible safety net. It’s funny how fear guides me to chaotic sources of comfort and order.

At times my fear is overdramatic and older than its age. I fret about ‘missed’ milestones and milestones that are years in the future; whether or not I’ll ever get married, funding my dream trip to the Istanbul Open, saving enough for retirement. Meanwhile, I sit here eating graham crackers caked with neon-yellow frosting (OK, so I haven’t mastered the whole wise-beyond-my-years thing yet).

Lately I’ve confronted and engaged fear in a variety of ways, through the goal of doing one thing a month that scares me.

I’m volunteering for the presidential campaign I support. I’m mentoring high school sophomores and juniors with the Greater Des Moines Partnership’s Youth Leadership Initiative. I’m training for my first half-marathon.

All three terrify me in different ways, ways that weave together the complexities of fear, fear that lurks in half-empty tubs of Pillsbury frosting, spilled M&M’s and lingering disbelief.

In writing-major tradition, I debated between “disbelief” and “unbelief” in the above sentence for 10 minutes, followed by my four-mile evening run. Though they’re technically synonyms, I clung to one word in the definition of “disbelief.”

According to my dictionary app, “disbelief” is the “lack of faith in something,” whereas “unbelief” is “an absence of faith.” I like the word “lack.” It suggests not the complete absence of faith but a persistent deficiency, something I can replenish with reflection and writing.

Before I write anything about my life, I read a minimum of one chapter from a memoir or autobiography by a female writer. The other day, this newfound ritual led me to the perfect quote, one I still can’t get out of my head: “Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves.” I am not hiking the Pacific Crest Trail like Cheryl Strayed in Wild; I am, however, a compilation of my own stories, and I’m consciously working to rewrite them.

I have a new invisible safety net, one found not in spilled M&M’s but in sentences, each period, exclamation point and question mark serving as the next destination in an ideological, identity-forming connect-the-dots.

Travel memories work like an old-fashioned slide projector. They hum, the crunching gears cruelly reminding me I’m no longer elsewhere. Eventually, I fade into the memory once again, and the humming fades with it; I’m elsewhere for that fleeting moment. Then, click, I’m jolted to the next memory, forever too soon.

In college I traveled regularly, reveling in the fear, glee, confusion, angst and self-awareness it inevitably offers. Without the flexibility of traveling in my post-grad life, I’ve found my gaze lingering on photos of Istanbul, Izmir, New York, New Orleans (and more), bummed I can’t remember every little detail like I promised my mesmerized college self I would.

Rather than ogle at my painting-like Izmir album any longer, I returned to the root of my fascination with world traveling, one I hope to realize.

My sixth-grade teacher, Mr. Stone, broke out his slide projector only on the most special days, days reserved for faraway places and more importantly, ditching the cliché rubbish of your typical world culture textbook.

With each wheezing journey of the projector, we visited Japan, China, Russia, Africa through his travels, each slide lingering long enough to provide a tiny twinge of longing, a silent “Wait!” when the “click” sounded, ushering me into a new elsewhere. I hadn’t had time to process every pixel of the previous photo, after all!

Memories operate like the beloved, resilient slide projector, I learned when I fell off my couch the other day. While trying to find the perfect angle for my new frame featuring the Izmir, Turkey, skyline, I had plenty of time to take in the photo, to relive the memory in its fullness. That’s what I thought, anyway.

After nearly 10 minutes of juggling the frame and my level with ever-poor balance, it bothered me that I couldn’t remember every detail of that experience — how we got to that lookout area, what kind of flowers bloomed there, even the name of it.

Then I realized it’s OK to not remember every detail because when I stop worrying about the natural fading of tangible memories, I find it’s easier to re-experience the beautiful feeling of wandering, wherever I am.