It's been a while. Yeah. Today it's not a good day. Not a good day for sure. I had a
good day yesterday, so the irritation that this day turned out in this way is the undertone
of my mood. There's a lot going on in my head and within me that makes me feel like it's
all getting to be too much. It's too much for where I'm at. I hate that everything depends
on how I feel because today I do not feel good. Sometimes it feels like I'm a hundred
years old. It feels like coming home makes me age an added hundred years as well. My
body hurts. My soul hurts. I'm tired. Every part of me just feels burned out. Exhausted.
It wasn't even 2pm yesterday when I sighed as I said, I'm so tired. To my mother. She
told me, there must be something wrong with you to always be so tired like this. Maybe
a vitamin deficiency? I sighed again. There are so many things to cause all of these
feelings, this fatigue. I'm trying to recover from over 9000km of road that was erased to
beat the snow. I've started working with a therapist to help support me through a battle
that I have to train for so that I can go to war in attempts to get my life back. Metaphorically
speaking of course. That alone is enough to exhaust anyone. My mind is constantly racing
and the storms, oh the storms, constant, unrelenting dumps of snow that have been coming down from
the sky, causing highway closures and the plows can't keep up. Any need to drive through
the snow, the ice, at this point, it's so stressful. Being home is stressful. I just
came from a space and a place where I was so zen. I did whatever I wanted. I had issues,
yeah, and maybe I didn't go about it the best way possible. Yeah, but it wasn't like
this, where I was so tired. I was able to shut my brain off. Here, impossible. I feel
as though I need to be isolated for 3 days at a time in order to simply unwind. I recently
had a very vulnerable, important, and heavy conversation with my parents, ones that needed
to happen a very long time ago. While it went remarkably well, it still feels like, holy
shit, things don't change overnight. My expression of my feelings and current state does not
ensure that my environment will bend to my whim, to my needs. I crave space, quiet, and
the loving support of embrace of my person, to feel safe, to let loose, to feel as though
my body will sag, where I can be me wholeheartedly, and it's okay. I mentioned before what still
seems to stand, a lack of time to journal. When I do, I don't have the energy to get
into the heavy, important things. I just jot things down in a fury, because so much happens
so quickly, and I worry I will forget it all. I know in the future, I will heavily rely
on these journals to complete my memoir and other books. Sometimes, though, it's so tough
and debilitating. It feels like a pit of doom to spare darkness. I guess it feels the same
way you could describe the experience of winter in Canada, where it's so dark and dreary,
where you put your head down in order to just keep pushing forward so that the time will
pass. I wondered if coming back to the real world would have negative effects, where
I would find myself resuming the grind, falling back into the hustle of the cultural expectation.
It's unfortunate to note, it seems like I have. It's not work related this time, but
it's a resumption in a capacity where I am unable to live freely as I desire, and it's
fucking irritating. Resuming life with others is hard when you're so used to being alone,
especially when those within the environment adhere to living within the norms, the rules,
the expectations. This is why I crave a return to my partner, to live how I want. Though we
will share space, I know it's much more in line with the life I want to be living, with
the boundaries and attitudes that are better suited for my overall health and wellness.
That sounds bad, and I don't mean it to reflect poorly on anyone. It's just a matter of,
I don't fit certain molds. I know that no one in my family wakes up intending to be ill-willed,
mean, or demanding. It's just that their routine has become customary, something that
has been alive and well for 50 to 60 years, and I can't expect that to change just because
I do things differently. It's weird to think that I was raised like that, yet here I am,
so different. I try to wake up early with hopes of journaling in peace. Then, my dad will
hear that I am awake. He will come out and eat breakfast with me, but want to engage in
conversation of all sorts. Of course he does. I can't be mad at him or fault him for it.
We don't see each other often. I have a different perspective than other family members, and
I'm the one who is most like my dad to begin with. Of course he wants to talk to me, and
I want to talk too, but I have this habit of mourning being my routine time, my alone
time, to journal, to reflect. I struggle to journal at night because with a drained battery,
I simply end up rehashing the day's events, where I don't put down feelings or thoughts,
anything past that due to an inability to tap into that side of me. I'm tired, so, so,
tired. It's tiring, all of it. Maybe I am being dramatic in this next part here. Maybe it's
a result of the general population not being so open and forthcoming about their lives and
what happens with them. Perhaps it's common, and I'm simply unaware. It just seems to me
that I always end up with the weirdest of scenarios and experiences that I am presented
with, that I need to deal with. These situations just add compounding stress to my life. They're
not common occurrences, so the involvement of working through them is often not a simple,
easy fix. It happens so often that I really shouldn't be surprised, yet I am still finding
myself somehow surprised. I am so tired of being the strong one, the resilient one who
has to go through these fluke situations as if to carve a path for everybody who is to
come after me. Why does it need to be me? I know there are times that I can look back
and see, yeah, situations like this happened that resulted in me acquiring some sort of
luck, or getting really lucky with whatever the end result was. That couldn't have happened
without the occurrence of these oddities, but they add to the stressful mess nonetheless.
It's just more proof to me that I do not fit into a box of being considered normal, that
I do not have a normal life with similar experiences that the normative population does. I don't
know how to explain it past that. If you've known me for some time, you will likely have
heard me vent about some of these things. I'll share with you the latest odd scenario
that happened to me. I booked an online appointment to get my tires swapped onto my rims. It was
on the American side of the border. All the shops in Canada were fully booked. Monday morning,
8am. Perfect. I arrived at 7.45 to see they were closed. The sign on the door indicated
that their shop opened at 9. Instead of taking that at face value, I started reasoning. Perhaps
they weren't aware they had an appointment at 8am and didn't know they had to come in
early today. Even though logically, I know that work hours don't change like that on
a whim. That's not how businesses operate. I returned at 8.30, where I saw an employee
starting to open shop. He came outside to ask how he could help, throwing in a reminder
that at this time they could only accommodate appointments as they were extremely busy.
I have an appointment at 8am. I said, he asked my name and told me, oh, I see your name here.
We don't do online bookings though, so I'm not sure what you mean by that. What? Okay.
He helped me get my truck into the shop. I set up inside, planning to wait until the
work was done. The manager approached me to ask what I had meant when I had told the employee
I had booked the appointment online for 8am. I explained it to him. That's not possible.
We do not have an online booking service. The clerk behind piped up to inform him that
he had received a work order that had printed for my truck with my name on it. He gave me
the wifi password and allowed me to connect so I could show him how I went about booking
this appointment. At first, he was convinced I had booked it at the shop nearby by the
same name in a nearby city. Nope. Confirmed it was this shop. After seeing it and seeing
that I had indeed received a confirmation email, he explained to me they were working
on revamping their website, planning to eventually have a booking service in the future, but
that it was in no way shape or form ready at this time. Clearly, it was live. I used
it. He quickly excused himself to go and call the web developer to try to rectify the situation
right away. They were so polite, kind, and thankful that I had alerted them of this oversight.
There was absolutely nothing wrong with the service, and I'm really thankful that they
were able to accommodate me nonetheless. It turns out they were already fully booked
for two weeks and were turning away walk-ins while I was there and running short staffed.
Maybe it's a sign I have poor coping, but here's how all of that went down for me internally.
I get there at 8. No one's there. It feels awkward for me. I immediately feel I did something
wrong, even though on paper and confirmed via email, I did not. I then start to think,
if I'm not able to get the work completed, I won't know what I should do. All the Canadian
Tire Services were booked solid until the end of the month. I had hoped to be on the
road to get to Creighton by the 10th, assuming the weather would allow me to pass. So I think
to myself, the alternative plan involves calling all 15 tire swap shops in town to see if I
can't sneak in somehow. There's no way I can get across Canada on these bare threaded
tires. I could barely break on time to get into the driveway when I would arrive home.
I'd slide right past it. Otherwise, I'd need to book the earliest one and delay my arrival.
More added stress. I don't know. Do people think like this? Do they stress like this?
Or are they chill and go along with it to just see what happens? Wing it. Before they
move on to worrying about the possibilities or the next steps of the current situation
they're in when it's unexpected in nature, I certainly do not do that. I always have
this need to be prepared for absolutely everything from start to finish for whatever it is that
I'm doing. It's so bad sometimes that if I haven't checked Google Street View to assess
the parking situation before my arrival or know what the exterior of the building looks
like, I'm sweating the entire way and my heart is racing. When something doesn't go according
to plan, it's a huge internal, fiery explosion where I can't deal with it and I just want
to give up completely. Sometimes I'm paralyzed in space and silently beg for someone, anyone,
to come along and help make the decision to sort it out for me. I know it's not a great
way to think, it's not a great way to be, it's how my brain works. It's no wonder I'm exhausted
all the time. There's also the issue that I tend to take on what other people give,
as in the energy in the environment, it's quickly absorbed, burdens me greatly. As much
as I have tried to learn to shield, there's only so much you can do when you're constantly
surrounded by it. Being surrounded by people who are anxious and catastrophize everything
is such a huge challenge. I may be able to shield myself from it and let it go for a
short while, but being surrounded longer term makes it nearly impossible for me. The defenses
wear off. If it's a constant topic of conversation, there's no ignoring it. Simply saying you
don't want to discuss it or hear about it doesn't help when it's not your home. I would
find myself building anxiety about things that I normally wouldn't be anxious about
until the time came to do the thing in question and I'd be debilitated by the fear that had
been planted there, that had grown there. It's frustrating to see this within yourself
and experience it when you know you're not like this and you've worked so hard to change
your mindset so that you are no longer trapped by fear like this on a constant basis. One
positive, I went to a few spin classes while visiting my home and it really allowed me
to just feel good, good in my mind, good in my body. It was an alternative workout to
shoveling snow, which was a nice change. It was one thing that helped me feel hopeful
that perhaps I could bring my feet back down to the ground to reassure myself that should
I fall, there is indeed something solid on which to land. Some of this content was a
struggle to verbalize in a way that won't hurt anybody that inspired the content of
this episode, but I felt it was important to be as accurate as possible to offer full
transparency. To summarize, I am so, so ready to leave, to head west and to finally settle
in and rest.