Being back in Michigan has been so lovely. The lakes have wrapped me up and welcomed me home, friends from all over the state have made an effort to tell me how happy they are that I'm back, and I've felt overwhelming love for places I haven't been in quite some time. However, my life is a mess. A literal, giant, chaotic mess. And I'm trying to figure it out, but it seems when something starts going right, a million things go wrong.
I was feeling really proud of myself on Monday this week: I accepted a job offer and it felt good to have the beginning of a plan. It wasn't the perfect job offer, being a temporary position, but it would get me started. I came to Grand Rapids to start training and search for a place to live. I was excited; and on Tuesday this week, when I arrived in Grand Rapids, things felt pretty awesome. I got lunch with a wonderful friend, visited the WMEAC office, saw an apartment that I liked (but was probably too expensive), went to an event at the library, and finished my night at Grand Rapids Brewing Company feeling light and loved and optimistic. Things were feeling like they were falling back into place.
Wednesday and Thursday proved to be a bit exhausting: I was training for my new job. I hadn't worked a full day in the traditional sense in over six months, and I hadn't had that kind of sustained interaction with people for a whole day in nearly 3 months. I didn't realize my ability to ride out a day like that had really suffered while I was gone. I'm also finding it to be painful to meet new people now that I'm back from Panamá: there are so many questions. People ask me what I was doing before I started this job, why was I in Panamá, for how long, why did I leave, how did I like it, what was I doing before that...and it's fine. I get it. That's how people get to know each other. But I don't feel inclined to share (ironic, as I'm writing a blog about my life and feelings, I know).
Explaining myself and my experiences in the last year of my life is inexplicably hard, because there is so much that I just don't want to talk about. I'm still working through a lot of my feelings regarding leaving Panamá, and I'm just not ready to have face-to-face conversations with people I don't know that well. I don't like to open up quickly, and I don't usually share willingly; the seemingly innocent questions I get from people are literally painful. They're opening up feelings about experiences I don't have closure on yet.
Three weeks ago I was living in Panamá, set on living in Panamá for two years despite a lot of struggles I was having. And then everything changed in a matter of days and I ended up back home, and I'm just not ready to have those conversations. I can barely have them with myself, let alone people I hardly know. But how do I tell anyone that they don't have the right to ask, that they don't have the right to make me feel attacked and ashamed with their honest questions? I can't. That isn't fair to them.
So I got through these two days of training with some white knuckles and only one emotional episode where I cried in front of my new co-workers. Today I spent a lot of time alone, on the couch I'm currently sleeping on in my old apartment, stressing like nobody's business.
My car is sitting in an auto shop in Baltimore, where my brother took it, and I'm honestly not sure if it's getting back to Michigan at this point. I can't afford a new car, but I need one for work. So I cried a lot.
I don't have a place to live, and I can't seem to find one. I have never had this much trouble finding housing in Grand Rapids in the past, but rents are rising and the huge ugly developments downtown are sickening. Every friend I have in Grand Rapids has offered to open their home to me, but I can't couch-surf and occupy people's guest bedrooms forever. In addition to being uncomfortable with feeling dependent, it'll ultimately make me feel displaced if I don't find something soon, somewhere to hang up my photos and cook vegan mac and cheese and call my home. I cried a lot over that, too.
I'm experiencing strain in personal relationships I have and it sucks. That's all I have to say about that, and if you can guess, I've been crying a lot about that, too.
I've got student loans to take out of deferment, a phone bill to pick back up, doctor's appointments to schedule to finish my Peace Corps clearance to return to country, and a million personal things to address. These are all things I cry over.
I'm a regular fountain these days.
So many things are so confusing right now, and it's all so overwhelming. For example, I asked a friend for help locating some possibilities for a new car, since it seems I'm definitely headed in that direction. I just started bawling my eyes out because it seemed like too much. The research, the insurance, the negotiating, comparing buying vs. leasing, estimating trade-in values, getting a loan or working it into my non-existent monthly budget. Like wow, way too much. But I asked for help, and the offer to help was even overwhelming.
Right now, at this point in this process of readjusting home, Panamá feels like a setback.
It isn't one, of course. I learned and grew and had an incredible experience that I was lucky to have, and that I worked hard for. However, coming back and feeling so out of the loop and needy is hard. It hurts my pride. It hurts my confidence. So right now, that's how Panamá feels: like the thing that ruined opportunities, lost me my car and apartment, and stole some beautiful time with people I love. The thing that took me away from my home with romantic dreams of writing letters and blossoming into a new person, only to be quite the opposite. The thing that taught me lessons I'm not sure I wanted to learn.
That's part of coming to terms with the experience though, and part of working through all of these new coming-home feelings. It's part of building myself up here again: feeling everything possible in regards to this experience and deciding which parts of it will define me, which parts will be beautiful memories, which parts will motivate me with anger or sadness, and which parts will become part of my life back here in Michigan.
Some mornings, I wake up and miss Panamá. I want to scream "BUENASSSS!" at everyone I see and speak Spanish and feel things be slow.
Some mornings, I wake up determined to banish the whole thing from my mind, because I'm angry and stressed and feel like it just made everything harder.
Most mornings, I feel both and try to be okay with it. I speak to myself in Spanish and imagine colibris flying by while I sip tea, and then I go out and speak English and act like I don't have another reality living inside me.
Yoga helps. Walks help. Friends help. More than one beer does not. I'm learning a lot about new ways to manage stress, because I don't really like to use the techniques I did in Panamá. They're somewhat tainted now, in a weird way. It's been good to explore, but awfully hard, like most things.
Like I said, I'm just trying to figure it all out, no matter how painful and uncomfortable it is.