Grump Be Gone

Landing in Chiang Mai, back to feeling grateful instead of grumpy

Because I live in a country with closed borders, I have to quarantine for 10 days every time I return home.

I don’t know if anyone has gotten a feel for who I am and what I care about in 49 days of daily-ish publishing (today is my 50th post!!!), but I’m pretty into having my cake and eating it too. I like to find win-wins. Win-win-win-win-win-win-wins. I believe in abundance.

And, despite my relentless optimism that I can almost always find a win-win, China has me stumped. I don’t know how to Trickster my way around this one.

There are things outside China that are vitally important to me, so I want to travel. Yet Sam’s job is location-dependent in China, and I want to be with him. Also, I don’t want to quarantine (ever again, if possible).

I’m not sharing this to whine, but as context to the idea I’m musing this morning. 

Sam and I are going home for Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Years, and, as a couple, we decided that it makes sense for me to leave China before him to pursue some of my priorities. It means being apart for four to six weeks, which isn’t ideal but it’s doable.

Unfortunately, the “you can’t come back without a quarantine” rule means that, before I left, I packed up everything I own, preparing to be away from our apartment for anywhere from three months to forever (that’s what you learn to do in situations like this).

A week of my life slipped away in the haze of “things that need to get done.” By the time I boarded my ferry to the Hong Kong airport, my tank was pretty empty. Sadness about being away from Sam, a week of begrudgingly doing tasks that I wouldn’t need to do if we lived anywhere else, saying goodbye to people I care about because the expat exodus means that any number of my friends could leave before I return…just not the most flowy, spacious week.

And I get that it’s whatever. I don’t know if it’s possible to have more “first-world problems” than what I’m describing.

But I’m writing about them anyway. Not because I want sympathy pats on the back or to be mocked for thinking that my problems are remotely “real” (I don’t want either of those things). 

I’m writing about it because I’m a writer who finds joy in excavating the inner experience. Carl Rogers says, “What is most personal is most universal,” and I feel like I’m writing about a universal experience.

I had a draining week and I emerged from it feeling down. Scattered. Depleted. Not at 100%.

I imagine most people can relate to that.

As someone with a history of chronic depression, I can’t sit in that space. Whenever I feel down or depleted, my priority is shifting out of it as quickly as possible. I’ve lost too many days, weeks, months and years to feeling down to ever willingly sit in that space for a moment longer than I have to.

So, way too many words of context in, I’m getting to my point.

Do you want to know the easy thing that helped me shift my mood?

As I trudged through ferry terminals and airports and taxis and hotels and all of the not-so-glamorous parts of travel, I kept reminding myself that I could be passing someone who spent her entire life saving up for the trip she was taking.

She could have been on my ferry, or my flight, or waiting in line behind me at immigration.

She could have spent her whole life working towards the goal of touching down in Thailand and I could be a character in her story.

I could be that person who catches her eye and gives a smile that says, “You did it. You did it and it’s going to be worth every sacrifice you made. Every hour of overtime, every minute that you spent tending to the inner fire that told you to pursue this dream.”

I could be the helpful seatmate who hands her a pen to fill out an immigration form on the flight.

I could be someone who helps her put her bag in the overhead bin.

Or I could be the scowling stranger who cuts in front of her in line to try to save one measly minute.

Because really, we never know. We never know what anyone around us is going through. We don’t know if they’re rushing home to say goodbye to a parent who’s on their deathbed. We don’t know if they’re on their way to pursue a dream they’ve been working towards for decades.

We don’t know anything about what the people around us are going through.

So I try to err on the side of assuming it’s something big, then I try to make sure that I’m not raining on their parade. Oprah likes people who take responsibility for their energy and I try to be someone who does that. 

This little, “What could the people around me be going through” trick doesn’t work for everything. If you have a dysregulated nervous system and unhealed trauma and live on the edge of burnout and can barely make it through the day, wondering what the person next to you is going through isn’t a solution. It’s not big enough.

But if you’re a generally well-ish person who’s had the chance to do his or her healing (or if youre going through a lucky lifetime that doesn’t require healing), little things like this can help.

Perspective matters. Perhaps more than anything else. And having a few perspective-shifting tricks up your sleeve can be the difference between staying in a bad mood or shifting into states of gratitude and awe. 

And, how could I not shift into gratitude when I remembered that I could be on a flight that someone saved their whole life to be on?!

I’m now safely and happily settled in, enjoying Chiang Mai, pursuing my priorities, and remembering that the exhausting week that made this trip possible was worth it. If you happen to be having a hard week, I suspect you’ll also get to that, “looking at it in the rearview mirror” place as well. And my hope for you is that you can shift out of suffering as quickly as possible.

Sending my love to the people who are having much harder weeks that I am (and those of you who aren’t), as well as my wishes that we all get to do the deep healing we deserve,

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