Vacation

JP (the bf) had surgery on his knee Monday to repair a torn ACL tendon so I took the week off from work to help him recover. I'm not sure I would have let myself take time off from work otherwise, and it's been really nice being away from everything.

My therapist has been giving me advice to take time for myself if I want to be alone (I always feel guilty knowing that my time could and probably should be spent catching up at work or trying to maintain relationships with friends and family, etc.); to try to consciously make decisions that will make my life easier (I seem to do the opposite for some reason); and a few other tidbits along those lines.

I kind of had a mini break-down on Friday and Saturday. The signs of this that were visible to others were when I snapped at my friend Violet and the fact that I was trying to pick fights for two days with JP. I never, never snap at people, especially my friends and loved ones. As soon as I got home from work on Friday, I also began crying any time I had five minutes alone. This made me realize that my therapist was right: I really just needed a break from everything and I needed to do some thinking about how to make my life easier.

Because it's been pretty hard lately. I've lost three close family members in the last two years; I was mugged in my own back yard last year; I've been struggling at work to earn the respect of my coworkers while trying not to piss them off, not to piss my boss off or cause her any undue stress (because it's my job to try to make her life easier, not harder), and at the same time make sure the office functions to the best of its ability despite my two coworkers sometimes just passively making my job harder by not listening to me (depsite my being more experienced) or sometimes actively making my job harder by doing the opposite of what I ask them; I've been trying to deal with an old pain visited on me as a child by a family member (a pain so deep that I have a hard time having to talk to this person years later); and now it seems that I may be losing one of my best friends because of the actions of one of those two coworkers.

So I told my family not to call and I'm doing my best to only keep up with the bare minimum of communications with the office; and my friend Violet--the one who I feel that I'm losing--well, she hasn't cared to try to contact me anyway lately, so life has been pretty peaceful. I can't remember the last time I felt this relaxed for this long.

I am thinking through things too, and may write about those thoughts. One sort of generality about my train of thought lately has been that the things we learn when we are children become ingrained in us as adults and it is worth it to reconsider the sources of those things through our grown-up eyes.