Vacation

I am no good at vacation.

I spent last week houseboating with my family. The weather was hot, the scenery was beautiful. I got a great tan and a bunch of reading done. But my soul was empty and I couldn't leave that ache behind. And so I couldn't enjoy the holiday.

Then I got home with another week off work looming before me. This should be a good thing. But it really made me see how I do not thrive without some kind of structure to my day. I felt like I had nothing to do, and I had no reason to do anything. I felt bored and lost and incapable of making any plans and I just wanted to go back to work. There was nothing to distract me from the ache. A week away also made me feel divorced from my friends, so my social structure began to seem insufficient. The more I noticed this, the more desperate I felt, the more I feared imposing on my friends, and the harder it was to ask for their time. This too has been a rough week of vacation.

Last fall I found myself noticing that every experience I have seems to be a negative one, and wondering why I should bother to have experiences at all. This past week and a half has reminded me of that question. Is vacation wasted on me? Is goodness wasted on me?

If you ask me how my vacation went, I'll tell you it was alright, okay, pretty good. I have a hard time assessing things as negative, especially if I can't obviously qualify such an assessment. It's not like every aspect was terrible. Plus, vacation in itself - getting paid for not working - is a nice thing that I don't want to complain about. But that "good" is a platitude that doesn't describe the whole thing.

I guess this makes me like the fact that I have a job to go back to!