The Travel Day

I have discovered over the past few years that I really don’t like summer. I mean REALLY.

I know, I live in North Carolina, which means summers are a wonderful combination of heat, drought, humidity, and storms. What’s not too like? But I seem to struggle with more than just the weather, I get really down. To make matters worse, exercise is one of the tools I use to manage my mental health, but I strongly prefer outdoor exercise. There’s about a 3-4 week period in April when you can start to acclimate to the heat, but if you miss that, it’s much harder.

And of course, that two weeks corresponds with pollen season. If you’ve never experienced North Carolina’s pollen-calypse, well, it’s also not particularly conducive to the outdoor life. Unless you like all your mucus membranes coated in a quarter inch of gritty pine pollen. So, yeah, not easy to do.

So, heat/humidity, which I hate. No exercise, which I hate. My horse is used in Summer Camps, so I don’t have as much Tinker-Time, which I hate. And, to be blunt, I have had a fair amount of trauma in past summers marriage counsellng, marriage dissolving, kids being hospitalized, kids being diagnosed with chronic illnesses…. Not fun times.

Like every red-blooded American, I occasionally turn to Dr. Google, and so discovered last year that there is such a thing as Summer Onset Seasonal Affective Disorder (yes, it’s called SO-SAD), and while I don’t have a real diagnosis, I seem to fit the profile. I hate the weather, which causes me to stay indoors, which causes me to get into a funk, which makes it harder to get the wherewithal to get out of the house, so I can’t acclimate to the weather, so I don’t go out… you get the picture.

Sadly, there’s not a lot one can do for this version of SAD; I mean, sure, air conditioning is great, but it doesn’t help the cabin-fever side of it.

So, I made the decision last year that, if at all possible, I was NOT going to hang around waiting to melt this year. I’m lucky enough to have family in San Francisco who have given me an open invitation to come for an extended stay, and I’m doubly lucky enough to have a job that doesn’t really care where I am for my work days.

So I’m currently 34000 feet over Utah, on my way to what I’m calling my San Francisco Hiatus. I will be working from there for the next 4 weeks, then taking a week of vacation, then heading back. It’s already hot and humid at home, but so far Meg’s grand hiatus is really helping my mental health.

Until today that is.

Ever since I was a little kid, I’ve gotten what I refer to as proactive homesickness, where I start to miss my home and my people before I’ve even left. As a kid at sleepovers, I would frequently be hit with an overwhelming urge to go home - right as I got to my friends’ houses. It wasn’t social anxiety, or anything like that. It truly was a wave of homesickness, so strong that it my throat would close and breathing would be tricky for a few breaths.

Of course, I still went on sleepovers. Even as a kid, I realized that a. this was temporary, and if I just white-knuckled it through, I’d be fine in a little bit, and b. If I kept skipping sleepovers at the last minute, people would stop asking me. So I kept going, and the feeling always passed. But it also always came. And even as an adult, before I go on a trip, there’s always a moment where my brain and my heart just don’t want to go.

It’s not too hard to figure where a lot of this lies. Losing a parent when you’re young tends to cause some abandonment issues. Knowing that people don’t always come back can make it scary when they leave, sure (I’m sure I’m not the only 10 year old who used to wait up for their Dad to get home if he was out late, but I also know that that’s not normal), but it also makes it scary to leave. Because if I leave, and anything happens, then I’m the one that abandoned my people. And I know how much that hurts.

But I think there’s even more to it in my case. My Dad was utterly traumatized when my Mom died, and the only way he knew to cope was…to not. He didn’t have a breakdown, or anything, but he also did not process or deal with his grief. That’s understandable - he had 3 kids under 15 that he suddenly had to raise alone, and between that and work, he didn’t have a lot of bandwidth for self-reflection. But as a result, I didn’t get a lot of practice, or examples, of the feeling of “missing”. Missing someone was something that was to be glossed over, or moved around, or ignored as long as possible.

So it’s taken me a long time (and more than a little therapy) to be able to accept the feelings of missing people. To be able to sit with the emotions of knowing that some of the people I love are still there in our house, and will eat dinner and watch Le Tour without me. Or, honestly, to say at other times that some of the people I love are in Asheville, or Richmond, or Atlanta, or Charlotte, or even San Francisco, in their own houses, without me.

I just finished My Friends, the latest book by Fredrik Backman. I expect I will write about it soon, because it struck a lot of chords with me, but briefly, one of the main themes is the idea that finding our “best humans” is profound, and leaving them, or being left by them, is so hard, even when it’s for a good reason.

I would love to have all my best humans around me always. I would love to be able to walk down the street and into their front doors anytime I wish, and to have them do the same for me. But life doesn’t always work that way. There’s a poem, “The Summer Day”, by Mary Oliver. At the end, she asks the question, “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

My best humans are all living their wild and precious lives. And while I’m grateful for the ones who are doing that near me, I am just as grateful that the further ones are doing it. I want them, especially my children, to do everything they want in this world. There is pain and sorrow and grief enough in life, if there is something that can bring you joy, you should grab it. And never let go. And the missing that comes with that, is just a reminder of the love we’ve been given.

So here I am. Still at 34000 feet, but now crossing into California. Half Dome is dead ahead, and some of my best humans are waiting for me there. Others are elsewhere, and I will be missing them.

And I will be living my wild and precious life.