So now I have been home, and without houseguests, for a few days. (Mark doesn’t count as a houseguest, exactly; though he doesn’t live here, he can be here without me feeling like I have to take care of him.) And my brain is beginning to come back, a bit.
So I am an introvert. Which, I never really exactly knew what that even meant until a few years ago, at least not in terms of me: I’m social, I like people, I enjoy spending time with them.
But it’s WORK. It makes me TIRED. But it’s a funny sort of tired. It doesn’t make me want to rest, or to sleep, or anything like that. It makes me want to RUN AROUND AND DO THINGS. As long as they are by-myself things.
Maybe it’s also the lack of exercise that comes with a disrupted life-schedule? Because I do exercise kind of a lot, at home, when I’m in my routine. And I hardly do at all, when traveling/entertaining. So that’s part of it.
But mostly…it’s like, I lose myself. And I don’t realize it’s happening, because I enjoy people, I like these particular people (all of them, on this trip–and there were many!), and everything that was happening was fun and good stuff. (Weddings! Parties! Meals!)
And this is the part I didn’t know until a few years ago. I would think, Traveling, friends, yay! And then after a certain point, I’d get all cranky and fussy and weird and out of sorts, and I’d attribute it to my period, or some imagined slight, or my own insanity, or I don’t even know what. And the story about me became that I’m Difficult.
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But now that I know about introversion, and that it’s a thing, which is real, and that it doesn’t mean that you don’t like people, but, rather, that being with people (however marvelous) empties the well, and being alone replenishes the well–now it all makes sense. So before this trip/visit, Mark and I talked about it at some length. We would make sure I had alone time, whenever possible. And even exercise, if possible.
And actually it worked pretty well, as far as that goes. I mean, I still ended up completely exhausted when we finally put his parents on a train home (and by that I mean, exhausted in the sense that I had to rush out and SWIM FORTY-FIVE MINUTES NONSTOP the moment we dropped them off). But, in the five-plus days they were here, I got out into the garden three times, pulling weeds like a MANIAC. Wow, that was therapeutic. I went to yoga class once, and did my practice here once. I read the internet a few times (but had nothing in me to actually produce a blog post, or to do any work or writing, alas). I laid on the couch and read for a few hours once, when everyone else was napping. And there was only one time where I (yes, literally) felt like I had bees under my skin…and that only lasted a few hours, and involved a drive to see countryside like this:
Which was astonishingly, distractingly gorgeous, and then I ate cheetos and then everything was okay again, for a while.
Long story short: I’m glad to be home, and glad to have no houseguests (other than Mark who doesn’t count, in all the best ways). 🙂 I’m so glad we made that trip, and brought his parents here–it was incredibly important to them, especially to his mom, who got to see old friends and family she almost never sees, and the town she grew up in. I really like Mark’s folks; they are good people, both loving and fun. And, because they’re aging (in their eighties), there probably won’t be very many more of these trips. But, yeah. Everyone’s home now, and that’s good. I do so love my routine. And I look forward to maybe even writing again some day…