I looked so happy.
And my skin wasn’t trying to stage a mutiny like it is now.

I’ve been home for weeks now practicing my patience and trying to want to be here.

I just want to go back.

But maybe that’s oversimplifying the issue. It’s not that I want to be in a place. It’s that I want to feel a feeling. A feeling that I felt in that place but is not of that place. In theory, there’s no reason why I couldn’t feel that feeling here–I don’t feel it, but it’s not impossible–or Barcelona or Bali or Brisbane. I have so much wanderlust. I want to see the world. And I don’t mean to cling to Vancouver as though it were some perfect place where everything always worked and made sense; I haven’t forgotten the times there aren’t pictures of. The times when I felt far away and soggy and confused, but through all that I really did grow to love it. And I miss it. Terribly. There hasn’t been a day since I left that I haven’t been “back.”

As my seriously brilliant friend Bassey put it:

I’m suddenly worried that I won’t fit in here. That I won’t create home here. And if I don’t, where will I be?  Suspended in some Brooklyn wish and DC reality?  That’s not going to work.

Marianne Williamson talks a lot about being in a crisis and how the first question should not be “what do I do?” but rather, “who should I be?” In other words, what is the lesson I should learn from this? How can I use this situation to make me a better person?

So that’s what I want to know. I’m torn right now between the idea of setting goals and actively creating a life that you want and accepting that those goals in and of themselves are meaningless, since all you really want is a feeling, and letting things happen in their own time.

I gotta say though, this would be a lot easier if I had just hated it.