October 23rd. Two days until one month has passed since I left. Two months since I last worked a shift.
How does it feel to not have to go back to work? It feels great. I don't know. I don't even think about it.
And I truly can't do so, either. It's not the same level as it was before. It's not a thank fuck in the way of enthusiasm.
Enough time has passed that these strong feelings have since dissipated, dispersed.
It's not stuck in the same way anymore. I no longer feel like a slave. There remain areas for improvement within my life.
This is something I don't anticipate that will ever go away.
I find that I don't have much of a routine these days, and that can be quite jarring in its own way.
It's nice for sure, but I know that I personally need elements of routine and structure to be my optimal, healthiest self.
It doesn't feel like there's as much writing on me or pushing me to stay motivated to even keep a routine.
The one constant, breakfast. No change in what it consists of.
When it comes to yoga and meditation, though, I've let that slip.
It's almost as though I forget because I'm so caught up with whatever is happening in the moment.
This isn't a bad thing, though, right?
I mean, I've aimed to live more in the moment and be truly present, to truly live life in the now.
At the same time, I know it's so important to take the time for myself, because being wrapped up in the moment, that's the problem.
I'm wrapped up in the moment rather than being wrapped up in myself in that moment. It isn't self-focused.
It's that I'm here, doing the thing, rather than what is happening within me on the inside in the present moment, in the here, the now.
That sounds confusing, but it makes sense to me to describe it this way.
I'm trying to cultivate and expand inner peace, to continue growth and spiritual development.
It's something I absolutely need to keep up with, which is hard to do when you're not doing what you need to support yourself in those ways,
to ensure that you remain in line with your core values.
This is something I need to work on.
Moving around, trying to make the most of my time in the now, this is posing a challenge towards this goal.
I also have a lingering fear in the back of my mind that's difficult to explain.
Somehow, I'm worried I'm running out of time. I don't know what that means, or what it's even related to.
There's no date that exists that I need to place myself around. There's no timeline, no return to work deadline.
Why do I feel like I'm running out of time?
I start to feel a panicked little voice, you're running out of time.
I talked to Tanner about this. He wonders if it's related to the timeline, with regards to the weather.
When I left, I didn't know when I would return, or what the expectation within myself would even be.
My parents figured I would return before winter, before the snowfall.
I felt like people didn't understand that in leaving, I was gone.
Returning to Canada in the snow would be difficult due to snowfall, storms, ice.
I won't feel confident taking the risk driving a truck and trailer through that, making that drive.
In the back of my mind, it seems that there also existed a timeline to return before snowfall in a more permanent way.
End of October, I'm already starting to see frost in the morning, and I've even seen some snow in the evening in some of the locations I've been to, or passed through.
I guess that might be the root cause of it?
Whatever it might be, it's instilling an extreme sense of discomfort, and I don't like it at all.
It makes me feel rushed to do things. Not the book, not the podcast, but rushed to live life.
The whole point of leaving life behind was, I didn't want to rush it.
It gets a bit complicated, I feel like I'm split into two at times.
It's great, don't get me wrong. This is a great adventure, a great life.
I think I know deep down though, that the end goal was never forever on the road.
I think over time, I figured I would settle into a place while retaining my adventurous spirit,
that this was just a get it out of your system while you can, big event sort of situation.
The spark. Initially, I had wanted to accompany full-time travel with a more steady rotation of contracts as a nurse.
That was my previously anticipated life.
Now, I notice the hole in my heart and soul being so far apart from my person.
I really, really miss my boyfriend. A lot of this trip has been so great, but also kind of hard.
Harder than I imagined it would be.
It's striking to me that I would be having so much more fun if he were here beside me.
We took that three week road trip in May, and we had a blast.
We saw and experienced all these things while living alongside one another.
We got to live the adventure together, and it was just everything.
It's not the same without him by my side.
I'm finding myself constantly thinking about what we would be doing, how it would look and feel if he were here.
It's just not the same without him. I think of him all the time.
I send him snaps constantly to ensure he doesn't miss out on all the marvels I get to experience.
This is a shock in itself. I've never felt like this before.
In past relationships, I would crave solo adventures, where I would feel free to do as I pleased.
Things I couldn't do with the partner at the time, because they never wanted to.
I was with the wrong kind of people who didn't understand this adventurous spirit, this desire, these needs.
It was almost as though I lived a double life in this way in order to fulfill those needs for myself.
Now, I don't want to be doing this without Tanner.
I find it very hard. He's my person. That much is obvious.
Plain and simple, I just want to do life with him.
I don't know how this looks quite yet, and I guess I really don't need to know.
It involves living together, a home, a life that we build, that is beautiful, and exactly what suits our wants and needs.
A great journey it will be to create that together.
Whatever we decide we want, and how we want it to look, just for us and nobody else.
So I do feel there is a pressure to get this done, to get this out of the way, so I can hurry up onto the next part of life.
Life with him.
This is where I hear him scold me, tell me to do my thing, to stop worrying about him and us,
that he will be there when I return, that he is at home waiting for me whenever I'm done, that he's not going anywhere.
He reminds me I need to do this. I've fully invested myself and need to see it through.
He then is sure to tell me all of the activities and obligations keeping him busy for the next few weeks,
another deterrent for me to want to run home.
He won't be there anyways, so I may as well be out adventuring.
It does make me feel better, and it does allow me to slow my roll.
While I will always have an inner hippie that lives deep inside of me, I 100% would choose,
and am choosing to make a relationship with him work over galavanting around.
I would no doubt still find ways to indulge creatively, writing, podcasting.
A lot of this stuff isn't even Instagram worthy.
It's living life day by day and dropping a couple hints to keep it interesting.
I don't even know who wants to see that specific part of the journey.
It's more of the growth and changes that I'm making inside that are important, that are what truly matters.
Anyone can travel at any time.
That's not the hard part, and unless I got a green card, I could realistically only be here for 6 months at a time anyways.
I get lonely, for sure.
I get in my head about it, and in those moments, I try to remind myself,
I am here, this is now.
I am doing this.
There's no expectations or obligations for me outside of what I decide to set for myself each day.
In a sense, I do a lot of sitting around.
I don't have a job to go to where I sit and get overwhelmed, overstimulated,
and I'm thrown more social interactions than I can handle,
where I then have to come home, and that's when I get to see my partner.
The sitting around that I seem to do here involves sitting and waiting for him
to be able to respond to messages when he's done work.
I think that I'm increasingly lonely, but this is where I remind myself that he has a whole life, a whole job,
and he can't attend to these needs of loneliness all the time.
He can't give me more attention than he already does.
There are times in insecurity where I've asked, are you mad at me?
No, I'm not mad, I'm just busy.
He won't say it, but I will.
I am essentially on a free-for-all path.
This is where it's important to remind myself that while my life is a much slower pace,
it provides me a lot of time to think.
Everybody else's life is as it was before.
It's still all of those things while I get to and have to adapt to a much slower pace in all senses of the word.
I do get lonely, but there isn't an urge to go out to make friends, to be social.
It's a deeper sort of loneliness.
I miss his company.
I miss our quiet nights snuggling, reading while he's playing video games or watches TV.
I miss being close to my person, the one who understands me,
the one that I have a great relationship with.
I find myself asking, why the fuck are you out here, far away, doing this, like this?
I remind myself this was set in stone well before I met him.
It's a battle, but at the end of each day, I remain true to myself, as promised.
Fatigue levels.
I have energy.
I can do things.
I do do things.
I get tired, but it isn't like it was.
Unless something bothers me emotionally or I have a very strenuous physical day,
I don't have the deep-set exhaustion that existed on a spiritual level.
It is so nice.
Well, money.
It's not so fun to spend money.
I keep reminding myself, this is all the money you have.
Nothing else is coming in.
It is not an endless or consistent supply.
That's not fun.
And sometimes there's a large fuck, followed by internal screaming.
Fear lives there.
Also, I'm here.
I'm doing this.
There isn't much else to say at this point.
I'll figure it out when I get there.
I have money, but there is fear in knowing that someday I won't.
I still am not convinced that this is what's plaguing me with regards to a timeline, though.
I think he was right.
It's a mental race against the knowledge that it snows in the great white North.
I have explored some options.
It seems affordable to hire a storage unit for my trailer to leave it behind while I take myself and the truck back up to Canada.
Where I could come back later, continue on, or pick it up to bring it home.
The world really is my oyster, it seems.
I shouldn't complain.
In my honesty, though, I'm sharing the inner workings of my mind here with you today.
Work, though?
I dreamt the other night that I was back at work and I just couldn't do it.
The expectation within the dream was to get up out of the staff room, go take care of the patients in the room next door.
I couldn't move.
I was cemented in place.
I couldn't go forward.
I was safe as long as I didn't pass through that doorway, that threshold.
I woke up.
I felt disgusting.
I still can't imagine having to go back to work as a nurse.
I feel a mounting anxiety, a panic rising, and I just...
No.
I tell myself, no.
No, you can't.
You cannot do this.
I do what I do best and begin to question, overthink.
Am I being a big baby?
Am I cock-blocking myself?
No.
Maybe I'm just listening to the way in which my body responds, how my nervous system flares up in those times of assessment,
and I just truly believe this is what I need to be listening to for once.
That part of the equation, that it's telling me something so important.
So it's like, well, I hope this works out that I can bring in money because I don't know what's going to happen otherwise.
Not an overly exciting update to be sure, but it's an update all the same.
I eagerly await Tanner's arrival on the 31st, where we will meet in Phoenix.
It will be short, but the best five days ever.
We have no set plans, just indulging in our presence together.
And as Janice from Mean Girls would say, basking in each other's awesomeness,
it's going to feel so good.
I think I will need to reassess how I genuinely feel after he leaves.
I somehow sense a shift coming.
Who knows, though? We'll see.
Currently, writing the book is driving me nuts.
It's making me nervous.
I wake up with the perfectly formed words to put to paper, so I try really hard to jot it down immediately,
so they don't get lost within the short-term capacity of my memory banks.
I have all these great ideas, but they always come up when I'm not sitting in front of the computer.
I worked on the introduction yesterday, and I found it very frustrating, difficult.
Sometimes it feels so forced, and I'm not in the mood.
I don't know how I want it to read quite yet, how it will play out.
Will it end as this journey ends?
I need to sort this out.
Something to figure out as I go.
It's nerve-wracking, though.
It's what I'm backing on to propel me forwards in some ways, particularly financially.
At least in the long term.
I have an idea for a second book with a fully developed outline.
I imagine it will come as this one is written, as they are parallel to one another.
So that's something, some form of progress.
For now, I'll just keep doing what I do best.
One day at a time, one foot in front of the other.
Until next time.