Pity Party for One, Please...

Okay… it’s officially here. I knew it was coming eventually. I thought I was mentally prepared for it. I even had, what I thought was, a good and sound strategy which was… just ride it out. But it’s Day 5 now and this saddle’s getting sore.

I am homesick.

I don’t really know when it started cuz I’m the Queen of denial. I can thank my Irish ancestry for that double-edged sword.  But I do know this: it’s been slowly building since the day I got on that plane headed to my new home in Beijing.

You don’t notice it at first, of course, because of all the excitement and logistics of such a big move. The first few weeks are like you’re on vacation; going, doing, seeing. And I was fully prepared for the “honeymoon phase” … so it was no surprise.

Then you start to settle in. You meet your new “family"… other ex-pats from the same company that brought us over here. And let me be the first to say… man did we get lucky! We are with a good group of people, not one weak link in the bunch. We have fun, we relate to each other, we support each other, and we pick each other up when one of us is having, what we have now coined, a “China Day”.

A China Day is when you wake up with your chest so tight you can hardly breath and all you can think is… “What the fuck am I doing in China?!?” The good news is… it usually passes within a day.

But plain old homesickness is different. It’s a tougher dragon to slay. It starts in your belly and lingers there for awhile. You can push it down fairly easily.  Do something, text or FaceTime someone (assuming they’re up which is rarely the case), or drink! It’ll go away.

But it comes back around quickly and next time it’s up in your chest.  There are few less terrifying feelings than not being able to breath. And once the anxiety reaches your chest it’s no longer possible, for me at least, to push it back down to the more manageable space in my gut.

So last Thursday and Friday were spent, for the most part, crying. That would be followed by a period of numbness, then crying again, then numbness, then crying… you get the idea; it wasn’t pretty.

By Friday evening I willed myself, and Mikey gently coaxed me, to participate in a going away party for one of the ex-pats heading home to the states. That really is the best medicine for times like this. You have to force yourself out and be social, which I did, and ended up having a great time. I laughed a lot.

So whew… glad that’s over, right? Not so fast. I woke up the next morning and there was that helpless feeling again. It wasn’t just in my belly nor contained to my chest; it had moved into my head!

Now I’ve been to a lot of therapy in my life. For broken relationships, broken family, broken job… I know how the head works. It will win… if you let it.  I can’t let it.

So yesterday I did yoga for the first time in forever. It felt great. Then I had lunch with friends. We laughed. Then a few of us went and discovered a new (to me) flower market. I bought tulips. Then I came home and fired up Hulu. I caught up on General Hospital. 

This morning I woke up and guess who was still in my head? Yep… homesickness. It didn’t help that when I checked my phone it had not one but two messages from Jordie that simply said, “Are you up?” That means one thing… she misses me too and is herself struggling.

Jordan is in class now so our chat will have to wait a couple of hours. But in the meantime I decided I will try and slay the dragon by doing what, typically, works best for me when I need something off my chest… blog about it.

Living in China is hard. It is mentally exhausting. Everything is a challenge, every move I make has to be calculated, every word I try to say invokes giggles or blank stares. The language is just not coming to me like it is Mike… I’m frustrated.

I want to drive my car. I want to have a random conversation with the cashier at Target. I want people to look me in the eye, on the street, and make some sort of connection with me. I want to see someone, I don’t already know, who looks like me. I want to have cocktails with my girlfriends and laugh about things that need no backstory… cuz they know the story; they are the story. I want to take Jordie and Nick to dinner on a whim. I want to sleep in my bed with both my puppies hogging the sweet spots of the bed. I want to sit in my backyard on a warm, sunny day.

Writing tends to relieve my anxiety so what the hell… I’m giving it a shot.  After this I’m going to get in the shower and prepare for yet another day. The Ayi will be here in about an hour… I will try harder to to talk with her today; she’s a friendly face and the only real constant Chinese person in my life… I like her.

I can’t wait for my FaceTime with Jordie in a little while… I’m going to dig real deep and try not cry. That’s what showers are for anyway.  But before I do that I’m going over to my calendar to mark off another day; I’ve been keeping track of how many days til I see her and Nicky’s faces. Thirteen!

Afterwards I’m going to bundle up… it’s still too cold here for my bones… and head out. I’m not going to plan my day; it’s not going to be so calculated. I’m just gonna go. I’m going to say “hi” to people on the street. I’m going to hold doors open for people. I’m going to have lunch somewhere, by myself, on a whim. I may even have a beer or a glass of wine and laugh about some crazy old memory made with my friends. 

It’s sunny here in Beijing today; the forecast says it might hit 50 degrees.  So maybe I'll find a bench and sit outside in my new backyard.

So get out of my head, homesickness. You will not win!

Thirteen Days.