There and Back Again.

I feel blue today. It didn't help that last night's FNL season, and perhaps series, finale, fell short of the mark for me. Nor did it help that I drank three glasses of wine after not imbibing in much of anything at all for a prolonged period of time. Nor that I'm in a city without a network of friends.

It's the last one, really, that's bothering me.

I'm a naturally lonely person, I think. It stems from growing up in a different city every other year when I was a kid - sometimes every year. I did very well when I was a kid, but the transition from Europe to America when I was a teenager was just kind of brutal - I was used to being much more open, much more okay with my individuality. There's also a sort of naivete that comes from growing up in Europe (or at least there used to be): kids don't grow up quite so fast, and the transition from child to adolescent is a little more manageable. Losing not only my mother but my home and my understanding of social norms proved too tough to handle - I often felt isolated or awkward during my early teenage years, and found it difficult to make friends - and that's where I really started putting too much emphasis on my relationship with my mother, too.

So there's a natural inclination for me to feel lonely and to wallow in it, instead of being proactive about it. And I avoid dealing with the loss by escaping into books or television. Which only makes the isolation more pronounced, of course.

I'm lucky in that I have very thoughtful roommates, and work is going well, and I'm in a good space. But I think I have to toughen up a bit and really challenge myself to be easy on myself and reach out to book clubs and theater groups and music opportunities. Because I've found great people and wonderful friends everywhere that I've gone - Gainesville, Pensacola, even New York.

It's terribly cold outside today, and the wind is howling against my windows so loudly that my room is actually humming sporadically with the intensity of the reverberations, and I'm glad to be inside, in my jammies. I feel sad, but it would be much harder to be outside, or to be working today.