Takes a week

I guess I had spent so much time in the last two weeks alone and feeling sorry for myself that I didn’t know how to exist any other way. So I spent the first seven days of life back in the U.S. brooding and wallowing in my writing and my books and my blankets. I simply didn’t know anything else. And I didn’t want to know anything else.
Writing had taken over my life while traveling (momentarily shoving aside disaster), and it felt good to be in my own head so deeply, so clearly. I had told myself that Chicago would be anticlimactic before I had even returned home, and I had vowed to get Thailand out onto the page before I sought to bring life back into my life. I felt like I had discovered things about myself that I needed to cement in the first few days back, to really make sure they didn’t just drift off into the ethers. I didn’t want the ideas I had to become pipe dreams or empty words. So I captured them and put them on the page.
And then I let the solitude and silence go too long. Or too deeply.
I was eating peanut butter cookies last night and writing my last week, the last of the trip, out of my system before I realized I had eaten all but two cookies and hadn’t done a damn thing with my week otherwise. Well, there was the other package of cookies I ate earlier in the week…
I knew that I wanted one week to remember what Chicago was like and start up the gym routine before going out in public or talking to friends. But the danger in that was the comfort I had found in the yoga and the laptop. Or the retreat into them that I imagined to be comfort. It was more like the comfort one finds in a heavy, too-warm blanket: initially soothing, the stifling weight and darkness lulls one into a dangerous stillness, and becomes all encompassing and impossible to throw off in sleep. That was in the heat of my post-return depression.
I had done so much and seen so much and felt so much— each emotion of the trip stayed with me—and I didn’t want to talk about it yet because no one would understand. No one could understand, because I couldn’t even understand it and explain it all.
So I chose to sit with it, hide under it. Sweat it out on my own.
That’s usually how I deal with things. Work them out on my own. Sometimes, a ribbon of emotion gets out and someone sees it. Wanting to help, they pull and pull and unravel the rest of it from within me. Once that happens, there’s nothing left to do but pull the dense fabric of sadness from the spindle and rewind it. Forgetting or ignoring the length of pain only leads to coarser feelings and more stitches later. So the best way to deal with what I couldn’t explain or didn’t want to acknowledge was to just internally untangle it on my own.
The writing, of course, helped. I have a million drafts and versions of articles about the everything and nothing of the trip. None of them are fit for publication, but none of them have to be. Having served their purpose, the cathartic drip pan of pages can now be disposed of. Cleanly.
I know that I’m lucky. Unlike some, I was able to rouse myself from the burning slumber, shake myself into recognition of the slow burn that was creeping upon me and pull the wool off from over my eyes. When I woke up this morning I felt for the first time since I’ve been home that I can maybe talk about it now. I did a little, last night, when out with my friend Brenda. I woke this morning and felt warmth not from the depths of woolen weight, but the light of sun slipping in through slats in the blinds above.