This time each year, I usually escape into a solo trip to fill my seemingly insatiable appetite for silence, and solitude, and freedom.
This year, I find myself in just about the EXACT opposite situation — locked down in my childhood home with my parents (and baby sister). If there’s one thing I am learning in this adventure, it’s this: all that childhood trauma you thought you’ve successfully namaste’d out of your life while living away? They were hibernating until the time you decide to quarantine with your parents. Then they fully activate.
It’s easy to be zen yogi when you live alone. Or at least on your own terms. But back under the parents’ roof?
A word, a gesture will be enough to trigger your childhood fears or teenage angst. A comment will conjure up those times you were convinced you were going to be put up for adoption.
But the difference is now, you have more options available than just the pavlovian response. You have the agency to disassociate yourself from the trigger. You possess the wisdom to take a breath, the space to examine your feelings, and the freedom to google “can parents be adopted?”. (adult adoption apparently is a thing). (Just putting it out there).
Oh Tong and Daisy (and Lex), you do not offer an ounce of silence or solitude these days, but you do provide endless opportunities to choose how to respond to all your triggers. For these incessant exercises in freedom, I am grateful. Thank you for being my quarantine tribe.
But I’m still sending you my shrink bill when this is all over.
Note: this map is neither here nor there. Just an expression of how much I miss traveling, and that includes travel to the corner grocer.