Jet-setting

Last night I took a roadtrip. I had a big map of North America that showed all the highways and everything but really really small, so you had to look very carefully to use it and it was easy to get a little confused. I had some people with me who kept changing- I think they started out college friends and turned into various relatives later on. I needed to go driving through Mexico to pick someone up, and then I was going to drive around the US for awhile, visiting California, Minnesota and Georgia. Well, I actually know people who live in those states, so it kind of makes sense. Anyway, I kept getting lost a lot, but didn't really care because I was enjoying myself. We saw all sorts of interesting things, including a train that someone had turned into their house and decorated with mosaic tile in pretty blues and blue-greens. I think I need to draw that one if I can manage to. I know there were other interesting, pretty images but I don't remember them now.

I have a feeling this dream came out of missing travel. It's difficult for me to go on trips because of food, scheduled napping and Xyrem fixing my amount of sleep every night. But for a long time that didn't stop me.

When it was time to pick a college I chose one as far from my home city as possible. I wanted an adventure. I wanted a different climate and to live someplace beautiful for once in my life. So I ended up going to Carleton in Northfield, Minnesota. Seriously it's like the exact opposite of where I grew up- small town, cold climate, beautiful place. It wasn't my first adventure. Before that I had spent two weeks in London and two weeks in Rome, several trips to Colorado and Florida as a kid, a week in San Diego and a lot of places in my home state of Texas. All of that was with my parents and occasionally grandparents. My first trip without relatives was three weeks on a program in Cambridge, England with a high school friend. Looking back, I'm not sure how I managed to go all these places, especially the Cambridge trip- I was really sick. A lot of this was between onset of symptoms and diagnoses.

Carleton was very hard on me. It's a really challenging college for one thing, and when you add to all that coursework my two illnesses and all the crap they gave me at the time I really don't know how I managed to accomplish it. In my freshman year I was diagnosed with Celiac disease, and it took me most of my first two years to get the diet down and eventually figure out there was something much worse wrong with me. I finally came clean about my nightmares and hallucinations at the end of my sophomore year. You can imagine how much that freaked out my parents. So of course I ended up getting shunted around through various doctors all summer, ending up with my sleep study and finding out I have Narcolepsy. I went on Xyrem, which started to help immediately. And then, in September, I left for a ten month trip to Tokyo. Yep, I told you I was crazy.

It was during that trip that I had a lot of really important revelations. Sometimes you need to just go live on the other side of the globe for awhile to sort through everything. And I realized I needed to slow the heck down. I was trying to do too much and it was very hard on my body. I was so used to pretending to not be sick that I was stressing myself out. My last year at Carleton was basically me trying to get my life back in control. I dropped a major, much to my parents' initial anger and frustration (yes, I was trying to double major! At a really hard college, on top of everything else- what??). I took less classes and just focused on graduating. And it took so much effort to get up every day. And I ended up having to come clean about the state of my health to my professors in order to get the naps in and miss class occasionally, and I had hardly any social life because I didn't have the energy, but I still managed to graduate.

Believe it or not that was a year ago last month. Since then I've mostly stayed home. I'm still catching up on the energy. Only after a year do I feel like I really have the energy to do everything in my now much lighter schedule. I don't regret anything- I'm lucky to have travelled so much. Especially to have lived in Tokyo. I miss it so much. But I don't know when, if ever, I'll have the energy to return there. Just flying there made me sick for a week- both ways. My friends are still travelling places and inviting me along, but these days I've decided I've had my adventure for now. What's more important for me right now is to take care of myself and figure out the best possible way to do so. I'm getting there, with the addition of Remeron, more careful GF dieting and naps. Who knows, maybe when I do have the best way to care for myself and my dog figured out I can go off somewhere more interesting again. In the meantime, I'll just dream about it.