I just took two weeks off. Two. Weeks. Off. And it was glorious.
I can’t remember the last time I took any significant time without opening up my laptop and stressing out, but I think it was in 2016. I didn’t touch social media or anything work related. I didn’t even open my email inboxes, except for that one time I did open them, before hightailing it right back out again when nobody had emailed me to say they were bleeding or on fire.
Instead, I turned off my brain, finished my Christmas shopping, and did all those holiday social things one does to be a part of the human race. I watched Netflix to recover from all those holiday social thing. I drank wine by the fire. I watched other people ski.
I did not teach myself how to play Vince Guaraldi’s Skating on the piano, which was probably a pipe dream anyway since I haven’t touched a keyboard in thirty years except to dust. Nor did I craft homemade thank you notes for Christmas gifts, nor have I sent thank you notes yet.
But I did go to Dodge Ridge to see pretty mountains and meet a bearded dragon named Jackie who likes to lounge on heater vents, and also poop on them. I went to Pelican Inn near Muir Beach and sat for hours with a book. I remembered that I liked books, something that I forgot, which just goes to show how much I needed a break. I made some decisions about my work - in that I’m going to show up for both myself and my work fully, no excuses, for three months (which includes built-in get-the-hell-off-social-media-and-the-laptop time) and see where I land. I even did a three-day cleanse to reset my all-bacon-all-sugar-all-the-time December diet, something else I haven’t done in years, but it felt really good.
For me, the challenge with cleanses isn’t the hunger - although I do find myself fantasizing quite a lot about roast beef sandwiches and waffles and also treating my loved ones to half-hour dissertations on macaroni and cheese - it’s the self-realizations.
Sometimes I use food to tamp down my feelings, I admit it. And it works a treat. But then when I remove food from the equation of a few days, a lot of things begin to rise to the surface. Like the fact that I’m pretty sure I’ve never let myself have a pet as an adult because when I was a kid I had a guinea pig, and then it died. I didn’t want a guinea pig, I wanted a dog, and I thought a guinea pig wasn’t a very good pet and it was kind of scared of me and then it died and I think I internalized the notion that it died because I didn’t love it enough. When actually, it was an old guinea pig, a second-hand guinea pig, and probably died at exactly the right time for a guinea pig. But still, I found my dead guinea pig in its cage one morning and drew some conclusions in my eight-year-old brain and boom, no pets for me.
(Yes, there are cats in this household, but they are my boyfriend’s cats and they will only crawl onto my lap in order to get to his lap. I am a cat bridge.)
I hadn’t thought about that guinea pig in decades but a few days without solid food and bam there it is. Honestly, I’m not 100% certain what to do with this information except maybe spend some time re-parenting that part of myself that thinks I killed a guinea pig with the force of my “that’s a lame pet” thoughts. Basically, I need to remind my inner child that we’re not god? EXCEPT THAT WE ARE. Because we are all our own unique expressions of god or spirit or the universe or whatever word floats your boat. But maybe we also aren’t responsible for the entire world or dead guinea pigs? I don’t know. Being human is super confusing.
Also, I eat meat so maybe the guinea pig isn’t what I feel guilty about? Oh my god, am I feeling guilty about the wrong things?
Guys, this is my vacation brain. Which may give you some insight into my everyday brain.
Anyway, it was a good and much needed rest and I’m actually excited to get back to it this week, which is more than I can say for most of last year. Thank you for reading about my vacation and my dead guinea pig.
Here we are at Dodge Ridge, before watching people ski as we eat nachos.