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Jan. 31st, 2026 11:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
walkitoutI was on St. Martin / Sint Maarten for about a week and have been doing catch up blogging. I’ll probably remember more things I forgot to include and I’m trying to get them on the right dates. There was a bunch of things like forwarding along emails related to getting the stepper set up for my MIL (hopefully that happens today) that I also did while away (and many other things) that I won’t bother to include. Mostly, I’m trying to help myself understand what exactly happened on this trip that made something I expected to be moderately enjoyable and relaxing turn out to be a lot more stressful than anticipated. Obviously, I’ve concluded that the whole sun / heat / etc. thing is something I really have to push back on a lot more forcefully. I’ve known this for years, but I care about other people and they like sun / heat etc. and I just have to start paying for them to do stuff where I don’t even go at all, because if I go with the intent to hide indoors, they come indoors and nag at me to go outdoors and it’s bad for me. They are having fun and they want me to have fun with them and the result is that I feel unsafe and sometimes that isn’t just a feeling.
So: if you are reading this, and I start talking about going somewhere sunny and warm with someone ever again, remind me that I wasn’t going to do that ever again. Ditto with Space Mountain, unless there’s a really exceptional overlay. But if I DO go someplace sunny and warm with someone again, I have to get in writing a commitment from them to let me stay indoors every single day during the day if that’s what I want.
I want to be very clear: everyone was nice and it was very beautiful. I mean, really ridiculously beautiful. Unfortunately, as an experience, it’s bad for me.
Ignoring all that, there is a separate problem, which is that my life doesn’t stop because I leave town, and also sometimes things happen like power outage, water outage, getting sick. I’m trying to decipher what in this mix is preventable, delegatable and/or managed in some other way so that it doesn’t detract from my enjoyment of time away.
My husband and daughter did great while I was away and were kind and loving when I returned. Which is kind of amazing, as this is only the second, and this is the longest, time I have left them. I’m really pleased with how that part of this went.
ETA:
I had a delightful phone convo with JC. I gave her a little overview of what I was thinking about in terms of how I need to modify how I vacation so that I never wind up feeling quite that unsafe again, but mostly we talked about the difficulties of The Conversation, rumination, feeling powerless, feeling like everything will only get worse, and how efforts to disrupt The Conversation are so fraught. We figured a lot out together and I’ll try to capture some of that here. (Not the radio show The Conversation — that thing that happens where many people will revert over and over and over again to Did You Hear About Terrible Thing and efforts to divert from that are never more than transiently successful. It’s the political version of the person who rants about a problematic relationship and/or job but never does anything to effect change.)
In unrelated but awesome news, there’s an Ilona Andrews novella out today! Beast Business! I’m gonna read that later. Mmmmm. Things to look forward to!
So: if you are reading this, and I start talking about going somewhere sunny and warm with someone ever again, remind me that I wasn’t going to do that ever again. Ditto with Space Mountain, unless there’s a really exceptional overlay. But if I DO go someplace sunny and warm with someone again, I have to get in writing a commitment from them to let me stay indoors every single day during the day if that’s what I want.
I want to be very clear: everyone was nice and it was very beautiful. I mean, really ridiculously beautiful. Unfortunately, as an experience, it’s bad for me.
Ignoring all that, there is a separate problem, which is that my life doesn’t stop because I leave town, and also sometimes things happen like power outage, water outage, getting sick. I’m trying to decipher what in this mix is preventable, delegatable and/or managed in some other way so that it doesn’t detract from my enjoyment of time away.
My husband and daughter did great while I was away and were kind and loving when I returned. Which is kind of amazing, as this is only the second, and this is the longest, time I have left them. I’m really pleased with how that part of this went.
ETA:
I had a delightful phone convo with JC. I gave her a little overview of what I was thinking about in terms of how I need to modify how I vacation so that I never wind up feeling quite that unsafe again, but mostly we talked about the difficulties of The Conversation, rumination, feeling powerless, feeling like everything will only get worse, and how efforts to disrupt The Conversation are so fraught. We figured a lot out together and I’ll try to capture some of that here. (Not the radio show The Conversation — that thing that happens where many people will revert over and over and over again to Did You Hear About Terrible Thing and efforts to divert from that are never more than transiently successful. It’s the political version of the person who rants about a problematic relationship and/or job but never does anything to effect change.)
In unrelated but awesome news, there’s an Ilona Andrews novella out today! Beast Business! I’m gonna read that later. Mmmmm. Things to look forward to!