The goodness of going home

I was really struggling with my plans for the long weekend. Most of my extended family already had plans, and I seriously didn't want to stay home. I would have spent the weekend on the couch, feeling sorry for myself and eating too much. And that's no way to spend time, especially after I had such an amazing few days last weekend.

So I'm going home to Maine. I'll see Colin and Hillary, Meghan (possibly with her adorable children), maybe Maria or Adrienne as well. I'll get to go shopping with Mom, watch football with Daddy, recharge, reboot, and get their advice on what's next in my increasingly complicated (but still wonderful) personal life.

It's really what I need. I've had an incredibly shitty week -- too much work, and very little has gone right, leading to a feeling of hopelessness, which is never good to have. I haven't slept well or through the night since Sunday, so I'm constantly tired and crabby. I'm emotionally drained and perplexed, not to mention hormonal (which should thankfully pass in a few days, but isn't helping now, and might also explain why I've been a complete emotional mess this week).

I'm hoping to hook up with Meredith next weekend. She's the one person who might be able to offer me the best advice going forward. I'd forgotten -- she and her husband lived on different continents and had very limited phone contact for more than two years, seeing each other only once or twice until he moved to DC.

I want to say at this moment how blessed I am to have friends in my life that are truly like family. Matt left DC several hours early on Saturday so he could meet up with me and Tyson in the city. It meant so much to me that he would do that -- he knew I wanted he and Tyson to meet each other. And Amanda spent more than two hours on the phone with me Monday night, listening to me blither about my weekend and everything else, telling me at the end that she felt so bad that she couldn't offer me any useful advice, and I told her that her listening was more than enough. And then, we proceeded to have one of our abstract conversations about the future, starting with what a couples vacation would be like (verdict: oh, God), and ending with what Amanda and I would do in our senior years (drive around the country in a VW Conversion Van, following one of our favorite still touring bands until we were too old to do it, and then we'd be roommates at the nursing home, until the day a nurse finds us, dead from making each other laugh too hard). I don't feel like I deserve to have them in my life, and I know how lucky I am that I do. The same is true for everyone who is relatively new in my life, who I've met or gotten to know better since moving here. And no matter how strange or complicated things get, I wouldn't change anything. I'm lucky to be where I am, to be doing what I'm doing, and to have extraordinary people in my life.

And even though my week was (and continues to be) supremely shitty, thinking about those things makes everything a bit more bearable.