And there’s the first-day-back jitters of seeing my teammates. Some of them I’ve met before, and it will be a nice little reunion. Others I’ve known for years simply as faces in a box on a Zoom screen. As we come together for the first time, what will we talk about? What is the proper response to that simple inquiry: “How are you?”
I used the lockdown as my personal creative vortex and compiled the road trips, therapy sessions, business trips, panic attacks and all the rest into a book. And that book was published in June 2022 and is available on Amazon/Etsy now! What follows are the first 2 chapters.
Two boulder-sized milestones – stacked on top of one another, heaped on top of me. The kind of life-altering moments that can exhaust your emotional faculties so completely that you need a few weeks of alternating deep tissue massages and tear-soaked therapy sessions just to get back to baseline. And I got a twofer over one long weekend.
It’s never really about the things. Delightful distractions, the leather smells rich and the cashmere feels soft but after the novelty of the luxury wears off, we’re all still just electric meatsuits traversing a watery orb, bumping up against each other trying to make sense of it all.
I finally found a natural counterbalance for all that dogged seeking. It didn’t matter if I was shopping in Scotland or sipping coffee in Savannah, the highlight of every trip was always the same, and somehow perfectly unique each time. Perhaps driven by a subconscious urge to recharge, I learned to ground myself with microdoses of actual human connection.
I worked fear through my brain like a third base coach gnawing on a wad of Big League Chew. Under the pressure of mental mastication, it shifted shape and took on a thousand new forms that evaded rationalization and neutralization.
I curse the season for being the only season that confronts us so directly with its impermanence. But fall is no shorter than summer or winter. I’m no physicist, but I am confident that time doesn’t move more quickly in October than it does in May.
I travel a lot, but not because I love it. I don’t have some great passion for exotic cuisine or penchant for historical sites. I do it mainly because it’s something to do. Moving around a lot as a kid instilled a certain level of wanderlust in me, and working a remote job now means that if I see something cool on Instagram, I can usually figure out a way to go there. So I do. And with each trip I add to my stack of interesting anecdotes, but I won’t list “travel” as a hobby. My hobby is people.