The continuing adventures

The darker days have been making it harder for me to wake up lately. I don’t know if it’s just that I don’t get enough high-quality sleep at night or if it’s my brain reacting to the season change, but it’s too tempting to just ignore the alarm and go back to bed. Oddly enough, the real world is usually preferable to the dreams I’ve been having lately: I tend to have a lot of dreams where I’ve had to move to a different city or province against my will (often in spite of the fact that I have my own life and job), where I’m trying to hide that I’m up way too late, or where I’m incredibly angry at someone but lose my ability to speak while telling them off. Maybe this is a much-delayed reaction to having moved around a lot when I was a kid, maybe it’s some pent-up and unexpressed anger over something else, but these dreams seem to happen a little too often for my liking, and they always seem to last forever. I also think something in my body doesn’t automatically wake up as soon as I get hungry, because there have been a lot of dreams where I’m waiting to get a meal that never comes or is otherwise underwhelming.

It’s been more than a month since I got home from Boston, and four months since my trip to Montreal, but it doesn’t feel like it’s been that long. I’ve been thinking a lot about both trips, especially when I’m on long bus rides, and what I would do the next time I visit either city. I like the experience of trying to find my way through an unfamiliar city, but now that I’m a little more familiar with both, it’s easier to get a feel for what I want to plan future trips around, where to stay, where to eat, and whatnot. I’m not sure if I’ll go back to either city right away, or if I want to use my next vacation to find another unfamiliar city to explore; I may also want to go back somewhere I haven’t been for a while (I haven’t been to Winnipeg or Regina in over 20 years, or been to Toronto in 7, not counting the airport).

At this point I’m fine with waiting for a little bit before I travel again; there are things I need to pay down, and I want to at least try some new restaurants and go to more shows happening here in Halifax. I could also use a block of time to binge-watch a bunch of shows and listen to music without concerning myself about the outside world.

My apartment had to be fumigated for cockroaches last week, which necessitated (at the very least) emptying and wiping down the kitchen cupboards. I also had to find temporary quarters for Autumn; fortunately my friend Alana was able to keep her over at her place for the night. My usual lack of energy on the weekend meant that I was in a rush to get the place clean enough before the exterminators came the night before, but I ended up paying for that burst of energy for the rest of the week. It took me days to get everything back in place because I had absolutely no energy the next night, and I had to wash the dishes just to be on the safe side. Between the time I get home from work and the time I need to get to bed, I’m usually too scattered to really accomplish much, and I sometimes forget what it is I’m about to do. Maybe it’s executive dysfunction, or maybe it’s a sign that I’ve been living in my head too long.

It would be nice to be able to shut out both the outside world and my internal monologue for a little bit. Maybe that’s what therapy is for; maybe I just need to give myself more space to figure out what would make me feel like I’m living my best life (a phrase I’m not completely fond of, but I digress). I’ve spent long enough without doing some serious work on myself; there are a lot of expectations and other conditioning (both intentional and inadvertent) I still have to unlearn.