[Probably] great holiday [definitely] wrong time

I’ve decided to come home from Pisa two days early and spent far too much money on a flight for tomorrow night. There are several reasons for it [in no particular order]:

• I didn’t do any of the things I had planned to do.
• I hadn’t been looking forward to it. Whether that’s because I booked it quite far in advance or something else, I don’t know. I’ve been talking about it, yes, but that was a lot to convince myself, too.
• I’ve had bad headaches for the past month and, when going to the doctors, was either told that it’s something bad, but they can’t tell me what or that everything is fine. Neither has made them go away and I have now been told I can no longer take painkillers as otherwise I will get some fancy name syndrome which means I’ll get headaches from taking painkillers. Helpful.
• I’ve had a bad few weeks at work – there have been layoffs [not affecting me directly] and several projects I’ve been working on have been far more complicated than they should have been.
• I have issues with my housemates at the moment. Well, issues might be taking it a bit far, I’m not very happy where I am living at the moment which was rather sudden and I didn’t see it coming. Instead of doing something about it when I first realised it I just spent more time at work or working. For the past couple of months I have come home and pretty much felt miserable every evening with the house situation for reasons I can’t really mention in this blogpost as some of them do read it occasionally.
• I have been stretching myself too thin all summer. Between three charities and work I’ve neglected most other things though at the same time I have realised that I am primarily doing all those things to distract myself from how bad some other aspects of my life are. Back to the whole issue of not having balance in my life.
• Everything has a deadline these days – things I’ve got to get done, things I’ve got to do, things I’ve said are more advanced than they actually are. See previous point.
• Family pressure. I’ve had two years with no contact with my family which, as many know, was fantastic. Once I made contact again, as my grandma was ill, I have been sucked right back in and am back at the whole thing of feeling responsible at everything. Whilst my relationship with my grandma has been better than it’s ever been and I’ve seen her twice in the past year, she has started again with her usual spiel of ‘you’re the only one I have left, there’s no other family‘ and ‘I can’t go back to the place I’ve spent my holidays at for the past hundred years… unless you would come with me next year….’. So I guess I’ll be going there next year. Fantastic. Saying no isn’t something I’ve ever been able to do.
• Several issues with friends this year from drifting away to a full on argument. Most are my fault for letting it happen, others I feel were both sides, but the damage has been done and, despite assurances that everything’s the same, it isn’t the same.
• Those stupid headaches just won’t go away.

I knew last week that the holiday was probably a bad idea and, when I started feeling really ill from Thursday onwards [I think #washingupgate2012 probably was the last thing to put me over the edge as silly as it sounds] I was sure that going on holidays would be a bad idea. In fact I’d pretty much set my mind on not going and only revised this on Saturday when several friends convinced me to and it seemed better than staying at home.

After the worst flight I’ve ever had on Sunday morning [Easyjet] I have pretty much spent most of the time in my hotel room feeling ill or with a headache so bad I couldn’t take it any more. Of course taking painkillers didn’t improve matters so I guess the doctor is on to something here. The noise and pressure on the flight was so bad it made me cry pretty much the entire time through and the snobby and chatty expat next to me didn’t help matters, neither did the aggressive salesspiel from the airline crew.

Instead of Friday night I’ll be coming home tomorrow night. One of the deciding factors, asides from me really wanting to be home, was that it’s a British Airways flight. And that I’ll be home. Ready to actually approach the things that have left me miserable and ready to actually improve things rather than booking a holiday to escape.

Of course I still have to go and see my grandma later on in the year as ‘she would love to see me before Christmas’. Brilliant.

Additionally I probably shouldn’t post this blogpost as a number of real life friends, work colleagues current and former, housemates and so on might read it and think I’m even more of a nutcase than I actually am. But I don’t tend to talk about problems with people as I normally don’t want to burden them or don’t feel it’s ever the right time. I love my job, I love certain other aspects of my life, but I’m just not doing very well at the moment. I’m working on it, but right now it’s been a couple of months of me not doing very well. Onwards and upwards.