3 more days!

3 more days until leaving for SE Asia - yeah!! The last days before leaving are always a mixed bag of emotions - excitement, anxiety, sadness, excitement again. The start of another adventure, this time 2.5 months of time to experience many new things, people, cultures, foods, etc. I always find that I learn more about myself than anything when traveling for long periods of time such as this. It may not always translate directly to regular life back home, but the lessons are always etched in the back of the brain somewhere!

December is a hard month for me. I think many people who have suffer from depression, whether it is mild or serious, have issues with the holiday season. Certainly I know many people who fall into that category - birds of a feather? I've never been a fan of Christmas. I remember one year during my undergrad where I got so fed up with the stress at home that I slept in the X-ray lab at Laurentian one night! I tell you, a computer desk is not a comfortable thing to spend the night on! Could have been worse, could have been the X-ray generator I guess... So for many reasons, most of which is baggage which with more therapy I might leave behind, I tend to become more withdrawn, impatient, and antisocial as the Christmas season draws near. Leaving the country over the holiday time might be seen as running away, but for me it's more personal survival.

December has become an even harder month for me in the last years. It was almost exactly 2 years ago that Abbey was diagnosed with cancer. Those 15 days were some of the hardest I have ever experienced in my life. To this day, I am content and at peace with my decision to let him go, but the pain hasn't gone away. It's diminished, and although Rebel isn't a 'replacement', he does help - you can't help but laugh at this silly boy all the time. But it still hurts. My father died the same week. Funny, but I mourn for Abbey still, but I don't mourn for my father. Maybe I had already gone through that part of the process while he was alive. Grieving for what could have been I guess. But you can't look back, you can only move ahead and hope that you've grown and learned from the past to better you in the future.

Anyway, all that to say that leaving at this time of year is a mixed emotional bag. But maybe this is a good thing - mixes things up a bit!! I am very sad to leave Rebel for this long however. He is very attached to me, and vice versa. It's going to be hard not to see the silly goober for so long.