Where'd you go, Andrea

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I was away from home from 17 April to 4 June.

In a nutshell, the itinerary was OK>NorCal > Oahu > SoCal>OK. I thought I had come up with some good reasons for traveling so much all at once. First off, why fly back and forth from Oklahoma to California or Hawaii multiple times, when I could just knock it out all at once? That right there is efficiency of both time and resources! Financial resources and environmental resources. In both 2021 and 2022, I managed to spend half the year away from home, traveling to SoCal to take care of my dad. So being gone for a couple months is No Big Deal.

Turns out I was wrong.

A change of scenery is always a good thing, and spending quality time in Hawaii and also LA is a privilege I truly appreciate. Hawaii’s plants and birds are mind-blowingly beautiful! Oh, and also the mountains are amazing. And then there is the water… Okay, the whole Oahu experience is really great. Even SoCal, with its traffic and, well, LA-ness, is beautiful in many ways. And the weather! Sooo nice!

a sunset in sunset beach, socal

The biggest reason I planned my Epic West Coast Tour was so I could catch up and connect with friends and family. I was with people most of the time and managed to fit in a lot of social events. Which was wonderful for catching up with people. I played cards, ate a lot of food, saw some movies, did some crafting, etc etc… Whew!

Here is the weirdest part of the whole experience, something I’d never noticed or realized before.

I saw “slices of life” of the people I stayed with. I saw how I fit into their lives, and how their relationship with me is a small part of who they are in total. And vice-versa—my relationship with each of them is but a part of who I am. This is logical, right?

But after a while, it started feeling kind of surreal. I had to keep fitting myself into their lives, their routines, their meal planning, schedules, etc., and I began to lose sight of what my own life, independent of other people’s, consisted of.

Each of us is the sum of our parts. Some of us play many different roles. We behave differently depending on our surroundings; we adapt to context. Of course we do. But we are also more than the sum of our parts. We have a core Self, a whole Self, who exists independently of all those different pieces.

I’ve always struggled with figuring out who I am, within social or familial contexts and sometimes in regard to that one Self. Once I got diagnosed as being spectrumy, this all made more sense to me. People on the spectrum, I suspect, spend more time and energy “masking” to fit into different contexts than other people. This process is hard work. It takes a lot of energy to figure out where and how to fit. So doing this while traveling for seven weeks took its toll, I think.

There were moments where I really started to wonder who I was, outside of the context I happened to be in. Oh, I decided, I’ll think about it later after I unload my host’s dishwasher and watch their TV show. Then I became too tired to think about it.

I don’t want to sound ungrateful! It was a pleasure to see what other people watch on TV. It was my pleasure to be of service wherever I went. I enjoyed the company of everyone I got to see! It was just exhausting.

I did get to spend a few weeks in Hawaii on my own, and a few days alone at my grandma’s house at the beach in SoCal. Those were nice breaks, where I could reestablish my own routines and preferences. But I guess it still wasn’t enough alone time to keep me balanced.

I also think I over-romanticized the “allure” of being away from home for so long. I forgot that my mind and body like routine. I misremembered the joys of living out of a suitcase. I also developed a few health issues (nothing too serious, I hope) that made not being home even less enjoyable. Plus, the dumpster fire that is US politics kept raging while I was gone. People in power continued with their plans to dismantle democracy. No “tariff deals” were made. Things are still scary out there. Travel didn’t help that part. Turns out, you take your anxieties with you wherever you go.

I was supposed to make one more stop on my Epic Tour, but the desire to be Home became overpowering and flying home early started to feel more and more like the right thing to do, until it became inevitable.

Now I’m home. I’m happy to be here. Well, kind of. I still don’t feel well, so that has to be addressed. And I love “home,” I just wish it wasn’t located in this particular spot. But I’m working on that.

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