For The Anxiously Separated

When I first got to England, I suffered from severe separation anxiety; you don’t know what it’s like to not be able to buy your favorite moisturizer for six weeks. It’s just cruel. I’ve also really been missing my friends and family. Being so far away from them all makes it seem like they either A) don’t exist, B) are in another universe, or C) have forgotten that I exist period. This pattern of thought goes back as far to my childhood. If you can believe it, it was far more dramatic back then, so at least I’m maturing slowly rather than not at all.

Any way, before I left the States, it didn’t dawn on me that I’ve never actually left home. I went off to school, sure, but if I wanted to visit home I just had to get in the car and drive for an hour. It was like I never left! I remember my first trip home after settling in on campus. I pulled into the driveway of my dad’s house around the beginning of September with one of my best friends from school, Caroline. He leaned out of the front door and said, “Is it Thanksgiving already?”

It had been less than a week since I said heartfelt goodbyes to my family before I came crawling back to them. As time went on I got better at not wanting my mommy and daddy, but I don’t think living an hour away from home was enough to prepare me for the big leap across the pond. In the last six weeks, my nights have been peppered with weird-ass dreams, the latest involving melting children. According to my roommates I’ve been doing a lot of “sleep-shouting” which has involved some key phrases such as “ONE TWO THREE FOUR! ONE TWO THREE FOUR!” And, in the voice of Gollum, “More light… MORE LIGHT!” Some other time I was yelling so loudly that everyone in the kitchen could hear me. Luckily they’ve been patient with me and haven’t called an exorcist, much like I would have done twelve times by now were I in their shoes.

Needless to say, I’ve been missing home and it’s had a big enough affect to penetrate my subconscious mind. Mostly, the stress has manifested itself in a serious fear that everyone I know and love at home will die and I’ll have missed the last days of their lives. Extreme, I know, but I can’t help it. I’m a performer at heart and if I don’t dramatize at least one thing every other hour I’ll turn into super-dramatic Sam. And that ain’t pretty, it’s actually really obnoxious, so I’ve been informed. But there is a good ending. Last night whilst, obsessively trying to distract my brain from imagining my family dying in a velociraptor zombie apocalypse, I read about a thousand posts of an extremely funny blog called, Hyperbole and a Half. Within it I read about seeing love as “stretchy.”

I would be injured deeply if I lost someone near my heart, but Allie Brosh helped me find some light in the loss of a loved one. She writes about the five stages of grief and how throughout that process, you feel like your life has suffered a wound that will never heal. Trying to fill the void someone has left behind is wrong because it’s as if you are trying to replace that someone, so you can finally get on with your life. Brosh said there was a time after her pet rat, Isabelle, died, when she felt she would never love another pet the same way. But she said something else that emanated a beacon of light when I read it.

Love is wonderful in that it can never be wasted or used up. We can never replace the people or animals we have loved, but the love we feel for them can be expanded. I like to think of love as being stretchy. It is easy to feel guilty when you start to love a new pet - like somehow that means you love your old friend less. But when you think of love as being stretchy and able to expand, you can see that there will always be room for everything. You can love as much as you want.

I’m not, in any way, saying I can’t wait for everyone I care about to kick the bucket so I can get my love-stretch on, but I wanted to share it with you all because it brightened my spirits a great deal. Maybe when you’re feeling sad about how much it hurts to be away from the love of your life, your children, parents, best friends, and to know that even the dearest parts of life come to an end, you’ll be lifted like I was. Now if you’ll excuse me, Terry just put on “Country Grammar” and I have to get jiggy with it.

A big hug for you,

Sam