as simple as yes or no.

tomorrow morning i am supposed to meet a few friends to caravan to a town in southwest missouri to celebrate the fourth of july. our community of friends from kansas city will be arriving during the day. berry picking. farm tour. pig roast. friends playing folk music. the carnival in town. fireworks. some will be camping. i have known about this event for a while now. and i still have not decided if i'm actually going or not.

while discussing my indecisiveness with a friend she asked me if there was nothing in my way would i go. one word answer. i couldn't give a straight yes or no.

when faced with decisions involving being away from home anxiety weighs heavy in the back of my mind. it is something i deal with almost on a daily basis. some more or less than others. but it lingers. haunting my ideas of what is possible. it's hard to shake. i don't want to be a burden or an inconvenience especially if friends haven't experienced or witnessed an anxiety attack before. when i make big decisions it is a factor i consider at least on a subconscious level.

but sometimes i just don't want to go. like tonight i'm feeling introverted. introspective. i want to work some things out. a lot to process this summer. family. friends. future. and i feel the need to be alone and think for a while. these moods tend to come unannounced. unexpected. and they too are hard to shake.

the problem is i can't tell the difference sometimes. am i afraid to go or do i really just not want to? cause if it's fear then i need to push myself and go. if i'm just not in the mood then it's not an excuse. i just don't know which it is this time. and it seems every time an opportunity like this comes up i have the same dilemma. i don't want to go and then i have to figure out why to see if i should make myself go or not.

i realized that it's not as simple as yes or no. it's more that i wish i wanted to go. i see photos of friends camping. floating down a river. going to the lake. taking a long road trip. and i wish that i wanted to do those things. i think i want to. but when it comes to actually doing it i don't. and i don't think it's just because i love my home or the city. i think it's more about maintaining a certain internal balance. balance that has been hard to find the last few weeks.

i don't want to wake up one morning and say "i used to be a lot of fun."

Comments

[moe]

Wow, well said. I understand what you mean in many ways. And in a way, I think we will all reach a point where we think to say "I used to be a lot of fun", but I think that's okay. Life naturally changes and transforms so that what our youth told us defined "fun" is simply no longer fun to us. Its hard to accept but its okay.
Thanks for sharing this post.

[andrea]

thanks moe. it's so true that what we once thought was fun no longer brings the same satisfaction. i feel like i've become an introvert in a way. but i think we just mellow out a bit as we get older. or find that it's okay to stay home sometimes. to not worry about always missing out on something. i guess it's good in a way.