I took a week-long vacation with my parents this past week. It was fantastic.
I spent a lot of the week just enjoying the beach, the sunshine, and time with them. I spent my 7 hour drive home yesterday enjoying the windows down, playing music that made me feel my feelings, and taking in the Alabama, Georgia, and Tennessee landscape.
The long drive home from a vacation gives you time to reflect. And a lot of times I personally reflect by thinking about how much I wish I could just start last week over. Then I get home and am left with crippling anxiety to go back to work and my daily routine. This time I really tried to avoid that at all costs. Unfortunately, I’m not someone that can avoid anxiety just by telling myself to do so. I had a couple of my normal tells that my anxiety was a little higher than normal. My chest felt heavy, I didn’t stop for lunch because I wasn’t hungry, and a more unique one, the hairs on the back of my hamstrings stand up.
I’m someone who listens to songs and genres throughout the year that match the seasons to help me feel present. Fall is one of my favorite music seasons. My go-to’s this fall have been some Patrick Droney, Zach Bryan is an every-fall artist, LANY is an every-season artist but best in the fall, The 1975 is immaculate fall listening, and I must admit my song of the fall currently is “Speaking of Georgia” by Peytan Porter (had to sign up to grab a SoundCloud link after hearing a demo of it on TikTok… no shame, it makes me feel like home).
This post isn’t to tell you about what music I like right now.
November is quickly approaching and November/December is my favorite 2 month stretch of the year by a landslide. I think it’s because it reminds me of home. And that’s probably really more about what this post is about. It sounds weird to me that the word “about” is in that sentence twice but I promise I rewrote it quite a few times and Grammarly still tells me that's the way to write it so that’s how I’m going to keep it.
Anyway.
I’ve now lived in two very different places after moving away from home. I have loved them both and would more than likely live in these cities long term before choosing to move home. Which is confusing to me because the things that most frequently pop into my head and provide me a feeling are things that make me think of home. I do this thing now as an adult after moving away and spending time alone, where I actually try to think about the feelings I have and why I have them. And for some reason it just helps me to get on here and type out my feelings every once in a while. I do it a lot and it usually stays in the drafts but every once in a while if I finish a post and think it may help someone else identify with their feelings but they didn't exactly have the words for them, I’ll share it.
I think I identify with and can immediately realize I like a song or a tv show or a smell when it reminds me of home so quickly is because of the time in my life it links to. I say that because I realize it typically always has to do with some time prior to graduating high school. I think there are really 2 main reasons for this. The first and most obvious reason is because I truly think I had the best friends and families (mine included) around me during the years I was growing up all the way through high school. The sense of community, love, and companionship I had growing up was second to none and I firmly believe that. The second and slightly deeper reason, which plays directly off the first reason, is that I had zero self-doubts and zero questions about who I was. I was confident in my own skin in almost every aspect of my life.
I think it is a much easier setting for that to happen when you are growing up compared to going to college and into your young professional adult years. BUT it’s something I don’t take for granted because there are millions of kids who struggle with themselves during those years too and I get that. The main thing is I never had to think about it. Where the second I went away from that setting I started thinking about it every second of my life and it consumed me. I didn’t know who I was, what I was about, or who I wanted to be.
“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” — Mike Tyson
Although I have gotten significantly better at it, I spend a lot of my days pretty overwhelmed and overstimulated. I used to have no idea what those things meant and it would cause me to react in ways I didn’t really know how to control or understand. Being able to better identify these feelings has become a double edged sword because I am hyper-aware of them but also fighting through it becomes a little harder.
In becoming more aware of these feelings, I’ve become really aware that I feel the need to have things enhance my feelings more often than other people I’m around. Thankfully, I am not talking about ways like drugs or anything of that nature. (Which, I’d like to point out there are people who are dealing with these things on a FAR greater level and are desperately doing anything they can to just try and feel a little better, even if it's for a minute. So I am not speaking down on people who do feel like they need those things to help. It’s an extremely sad reality and I understand.) I’m talking about small ways like watching Gotham on a cold fall evening to get into the even darker fall, rainy feeling. Or listening to certain songs on my way to work in the morning that I would never listen to on the way home from work. These are really poor ways to express this so I apologize, but I hope you get the point.
After about 5 years in my life, I had to try and relearn how to feel feelings. It was only when I moved away for the first time I started to take into account my feelings and why I was feeling them. The lucky part about my time in that place and coming out of this state of mind was I always felt I had great people around me. I went on for about 5 years living in a sad, depressed, overwhelmed state, and in that time every mood other than those things I just mentioned was completely watered down. Being depressed isn’t being sad 100% of the time. It's having a deep feeling of being overwhelmed, worried, feeling really sad or blah 95% of the time with roughly 5% of time filled with other emotions. And for me, when those other 5% of emotions were to be had, it was like getting your diet coke out of the machine that everyone once thought was cool because you could put lime in your cherry fanta until finally we all opened our eyes and realized we don’t care about that we just want our regular drinks and then our regular drinks tasted like shit because some 8 year old in front of us put grape in their cherry lime sprite. What I guess I’m trying to say is, it was just off… and those machines can go to hell.
Sometimes it bothers me that I feel like I need to do something extra to feel something I want to feel at a certain time. But I also understand that other people do this to a lesser extent and they just don’t really think about it. Most people listen to Christmas music to get excited for Christmas without thinking about it too much and I do the exact same thing, just almost every day, for all kinds of different situations, and it’s at the forefront of my mind.
I’ve had a different relationship with feeling feelings in the past couple years and that's okay. It’s made me more organized, made me keep my apartment much cleaner, and has still allowed me to get pissed at referees during sporting events.
My long drives alone usually allow me a time and place to think uninterrupted and this one was no different. I celebrated that today by writing this, listening to a cozy coffeehouse jazz playlist on youtube, and doing laundry. Tonight I’ll let my week come to an end with the House of the Dragon finale which I’m sure will cap off my relaxing day and week with a very casual and not at all chaotic episode.
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