Friendly Reminder to Pretty Please Ignore Me if I’m Staying With You
Credit: Milan Popovic on Unsplash
My absolute, no-questions-asked favorite way to be welcomed as a guest in someone’s home is to be ignored for multiple hours every day.
If you have a job and I’m staying with you during the week, the kindest thing you can do is not take off. Don’t use your vacation days. Instead, work while I’m there and then plan to spend the evening together.
If you’re a stay-at-home mom, few things will make me more delighted than you sticking with your normal routines. I promise you – from the bottom of my heart – I don’t want to be entertained.
Do you know why?
Because I am someone who loves my work.
I am someone who loves my hobbies.
I’m also someone who lives across the globe from her friends and family. Therefore, when I’m staying with you, it’s likely part of a multi-stop tour.
That’s different from a lot of guests, right? Most people who stay with you are there for the weekend. They live their life, they come to see you, then they go back to their life.
For me, it’s not like that.
Today, for instance, I’m packing my bag for a three-week trip.
I’ll spend 20 hours traveling to get where I’m going.
Then I’ll spend two nights in one hotel and one night in a different one. Then I’ll stay with my friends Sneh and Gyula for eight nights, then another hotel night, followed by another 12 hours of flying.
Then it’s two nights at my brother’s house, two nights at a friend's house, a night with my sister-in-law, a night with my parents-in-law, driving back to Pennsylvania, nine hours of flying, two days in Rome (!!!!), then 20 hours of travel home.
I’m pumped for my trip. I think it’s going to be a great time, and compared to Sam, my travel schedule is easy (he has eight days of “one night here, flight, one night there” while I’m snugly settled in at Sneh’s).
The only reason I feel excited about it, though, is that I have repeatedly communicated to my friends and family that I really, really, REALLY need a few hours to myself each day.
I love my people. With my whole heart.
And…
I’m not a chatty person. I want to gouge my eyes out with a fork when I spend day after day after day sitting around chit-chatting.
I can’t do it. It doesn't matter how much I love you, how important you are to me – if that’s what the trip will be like, I’m going to come home worn out, depleted, and miserable.
Because it’s not just the two days I spend at your house chatting that wear me out. It’s that I came from two days doing that at someone else’s house and I still have three more stops ahead of me.
I only learned this from doing it wrong. Our trips home used to be like this, then I reached the point of questioning if I should just stop traveling altogether. Stay in Asia and see everyone when we move home.
Then Sam, wise man that he is, suggested that I get some help finding a middle ground that worked. So I have – gleefully, unabashedly, and oh-so-gratefully – received coaching on this topic. I have paid a brilliant woman to help me find a sustainable way to enjoy my trips home. To enjoy friends and family without turning into a bitter, resentful hag. To return to my day-to-day life with abundant energy instead of feeling worn out and depleted.
And the solution is remarkably simple. I just need a few hours by myself to do the things that fill my heart with soaring joy, then I’m energized and excited for our time together.
While this is a musing that’s mostly about a weird quirk of mine (there are few people who are as vehemently anti-”hanging-out” as I am), there’s some “learning in public” going on here.
Guys – we’re all allowed to do this. We’re all allowed to figure out what it is that makes us feel like the happiest, healthiest, most fulfilled versions of ourselves, then ask our loved ones for support in pursuing those things.
And if your loved ones are anything like mine, they’re going to be happy to do it.
People kinda just want clear instructions on how we wanted to be treated, just like you probably would delight in clear instructions on how you’re favs like to be treated.
Communication. Who woulda thunk?
Love,
Your super wordy pal who ironically hates talking
