Back to myself, whatever that means

As expected, I slept the weekend away and didn’t concern myself with getting anything posted while I recovered from whatever it was that was laying me low last week. I needed those three days off; it also helped that I didn’t have to trudge to work through the snow on Friday. I’m still a little sleepy today but overall, I’m feeling a lot better physically and more able to stand being in the world outside my apartment.

November is not my favorite month. I’ve already said as much before, and even if some of my favorite people were born this month (particularly today), I notice a shift in my mood whenever the days get shorter and colder. Going to work in darkness, coming home in darkness. Thoughts of time passing. I really should get a SAD lamp sometime. I’m trying to fight it with a night out on Friday, mainly because when I get conscious of the fact that I’ve been withdrawing I tend to overcompensate with a scheduled excuse to invite friends.

I’ve also had my share of strange and/or unnerving dreams over the last few nights. My family moving either to the middle of nowhere or to a dodgy-looking apartment is a common one lately. So is breaking into a space I don’t belong and trying not to get caught. I also remember dreams where I’m back in Selkirk, Manitoba (which has become unrecognizably built up in the 20 years since I lived there), one where that I had to take a cab all the way home from an Irving station in rural New Brunswick, and and another one where a previous boss was crashing in my apartment for some reason. The worst dream I won’t get into too much detail, but it takes a tragedy that happened to one of my online friends and transplants it onto another friend’s family. There are also the cliche dreams such as being naked in public or having an exam/assignment in a class that I haven’t attended all semester, but those happen enough every so often.

I would like to say that I feel myself more this week, but I’m not sure what that means. I still feel like I have to adapt myself to my surroundings, and that takes a lot out of me. Is my true self who I am when I’m alone with my cat, or can it only exist from my relationships with others?

When I take weekends off to recover from being all peopled out, I really wish I could just let myself lie down and bury myself in music for an extended period of time; not as background noise as I use it when writing, but full immersion into the recordings, either to explore a new artist I’m not familiar with, or re-familiarize myself with a catalog I hadn’t dove into for years. Maybe next time I feel the urge to hide n the apartment all weekend, I should do that, but I always feel like something like that should be tied to some sort of project. Same with binge-watching a TV show. It’s all about content for the blog these days; it’s not about losing myself in something anymore.

I’ve been craving a stretch of time alone in an unfamiliar city lately; I want to rent a hotel room (maybe splurge for a nice one) and head somewhere I’ve never been. It would be nice to meet up with people I only know online or haven’t seen in years, but there’s a part of me that wants to head somewhere without any expectation or obligation to visit anyone.