4 Day Bender and Introspection

I'm down on myself right now and I feel like I just had to come out and say it. I was supposed to go up north for my vacation this week and I didn't. There were news reports coming out about the massive amounts of rain unloading on Chiang Mai and Pai, resulting in floods galore. Thus, I opted out and decided to stay put in Phuket. This makes some sense, floods and inability to travel can make travel not only less enjoyable, but impossible - which I experienced here, some months ago, when I was stranded during a visa run in middle-of-nowhere, Thailand, due to the 6 inches of water that my van had to drive through just to get off of the island - and it only got worse. (The rain in Thailand is freaking epic...and I'm not saying this just because I grew up in the desert!)

Yet, the reason I'm down about staying stationary is because I was so looking forward to "introspection" and out-on-my-own time - just reading and being good to myself. What did I do instead? I basically drank for 4 days straight and sat in the rain on the island. Okay, that makes it sound a lot worse than it was, but it's not far off.

Recently, I have had so many friends leaving Phuket. Remember what I said about the end of season and end of contract stuff? Well, we are in between semesters currently and I'm saying a lot of good byes. It's hard. It makes me realize how we are constantly moving and altering our life paths with decisions that pull us in opposing directions. Additionally, with these new avenues of change and diverging life choices, we find ourselves spending time with each other only during "reunion tours" or via e-mail.

A good friend of mine just moved away from everything that they have ever known to take advantage of their next big step in this ol' life. The magnitude of a move like that, just like for myself coming to Thailand, forces you to interrogate your lifestyle, your relationships (in all senses), and your goals and aspirations. Maybe this is because moving can be a lonely decision - arriving in an unfamiliar place and having to create friendships with people who can't tease you about the one....or two times you had dreads or prop you up with memories of your struggles and how you surpassed them. History. In Los Alamos, New Mexico - my miniscule home town - everyone knows everyone's history - for better or for worse - and so the sense of community that I graduated high school with, dramatically shaped my need for "foundation", "history", " base", what have you - in the rest of my life. I feel lost without it. I'm the O.A.R. song, "Home", and I have found that my underpinnings, my footing, the bedrock of my soul has been centered around friendships, growing increasingly more invaluable to me over the span of this last year.

I graduated in the spring of 2010 from University and for the first time since leaving my hometown, I was realizing that another move would soon be in order. As things began to fall apart with my home life, I found myself stumbling through living - desperately trying to keep a brave face and be the confident and self assured person I have always attempted to project myself as. Despite my best efforts, I couldn't always do it, but what held me together was my family of friends. What was so amazing and fantastic was that some of the bonds that grew out of the darkest days of my struggles, though new friendships at the time, have been with me, unwavering, ever since. Even in a year of e-mail substitutions for intimacy, my love of my friend-family, has become my bedrock; my foundation. It is hard leaving everything that you know and trying to establish yourself in a new place. I know this first hand, as I left green chile, Burt's Bees, fixies, electro, English speakers, and the mountains to move to the other side of the world, for Christ's sake, but like my friend who just transitioned from everything that they have ever known, I'm also learning a lot about myself in the process.

What I've learned is that my foundation isn't bedrock, isn't solidified cement. My foundation is like a tree's, with a roots system that is forever growing, expanding, and strengthening.

I recently chatted with another friend over some beverages about how awesome our friendship had become and he said that I was just "one of the dudes", haha - not the first time I've heard that. I do surround myself mostly with guy friends, partly because of my inability to have healthy/functioning relationships with the opposite sex in a relationshippy kind of way and partly because of the awesome people that I have met who "Jones" over rock, get psyched on outdoor activities, can just chill out, or get crazy at electro shows. Whatever it is, due to my no nonsense habitual friender ways, I now have some of the greatest relationships that I am monumentally grateful for.

So, I might have gone on a 4 day drinking binge, but I made it through, more or less, and now that people who were dragging out the leaving process (haha, only love!) have left, I am in recovery in both body and mind. I'm down for not being able to head up to the north and see the things that I wanted to see, but perhaps having time to say good bye, lob fireworks at possessed folk in the Vegetarian Festival, and lay in bed all day listening to the rain and thinking about my life, has given me a chance for some degree of introspection, just as I wanted. I am leaving tomorrow to go get some additional climbing therapy and I couldn't be happier about it, but I can't discredit this time spent with people close to me, even if we tried to erase the final moments from our memories with legalized poison. It is hard being in new places and it does force us to question the things around us, resulting sometimes in uncomfortable conclusions. This is part of the growing process, I guess. Lucky for me, I have discovered that at my lowest and highest (can't smile wide enough, reach for the stars) moments, I still have my feet on the ground, rooted by the network of family members that span the globe, friendships that are integrally tied to my existence. I have so much love for them that cannot be properly conveyed through e-mails nor gushy blog posts, but I feel it when I think of you and believe me, I'm sending it right back.