Friday, January 9, 2009

The New Blog

Every day is a new day in the life of me. Upon waking up, it does not matter what I have done the previous day or days. I could have saved the world yesterday from a massive attack from aliens and it would not matter today. I am always concerned with what I am going to do today. Or rather in my head it typically goes something like: "What am I not doing right now that I should be doing?".

Life since I have returned home has been filled with a great deal of mental difficulty. On almost every morning since my return home I wake up and immediately I am filled with feelings of mass anxiety and fear. For the longest time I could not really tell why I was waking up and being overwhelmed with these feelings. My normal reaction to this has been to want to sleep longer in the hopes that I will then wake up feeling refreshed and ready to take on the new day. This, however, has not happened once yet. Typically if I do go back to sleep at all, I will then be bombarded with dreams of a terrible nature and the feelings that I have will increase in their strength and severity. This is quite unusual to me because I am very much accustomed to sleeping soundly and peacefully. For the last couple of years, sleep has almost always been the one thing I can count on to consistently make me feel good in my life. It seems now that this is no longer the case.

I have a long list of things I wish to accomplish that are either down somewhere on paper or in my mind. Over the last several weeks since my return home, I have not really been able to accomplish any of them. I believe that I now understand that the feelings that hit me as soon as I wake up, and then are a burden the rest of the day, are related to this list of things that I have yet to accomplish. I feel that this list has become my job. These are tasks that I do not really want to do, but rather things that I must do and in this thought, all of these tasks then become my job. However, this job has no breaks and no time off. It is a job that exists every day of my waking life and has since I have returned home...that is until this morning when I awoke to find myself without anxiety and without fear for the first time in what seems like a long time. Now it all makes perfect sense because today was the first day since I have returned home that I did not expect myself to accomplish any task during the day. Today I expect myself to do absolutely nothing in the way of my "job". Today is simply about doing what I want to do, when I want to do it and nothing more. There are no expectations that will not be met. There is no fear about falling behind in my perfectionistic, task oriented mind. In essence, today is my first day off from work for a long time. Oddly enough, having a day off has given me the insight and passion to write a new blog. Ironically, writing a blog has been one of the things on my long list of tasks that I need to do. So here I am in the morning of my "day off" doing something that I have told myself that I needed to do for a long time now, but have not because of the overwhelming and all consuming feelings of anxiety and fear that have been controlling my life.

Now I need to determine what I should do now that I am aware of what is going on in my head and what is the major contributing factor to how I have been feeling since my return home. I suppose my cognitive behavior therapy training might come in handy in this case. Lowering my expectations of myself while at the same time giving myself credit for the things that I do accomplish may help me cope. I am very harsh on myself, and I know this...yet I find it very difficult to be anything but my own harshest critic and worst enemy.

THE NEW BLOG:
I am back from my TREK around the world and now the holidays are over. The question on my mind is where do I go from here? I really have no clue. Will I travel again? Maybe. If I do travel where will I go? I do not know.

This blog was made specifically to chronicle my travels around the world and the experiences that I had as I did them. It seems to me though, that this blog has evolved beyond to be just about travel. It has become something much more personal to me. It is a way for me to express my feelings and emotions in a way which could not otherwise be possible. Writing allows me to express parts of myself that I could not otherwise express. It helps me to sort out my feelings and emotions and also allows me to give the people in my life a way to perhaps better understand who I am and why I do what I do.

With this in mind, I have renamed my blog and changed the main focus to be not about my travels, but about me and my journey through life. Not quite as exciting I guess, but whatever.