ISREAL Entry 3: A F*cking Tornado

Hopefully, things get easier.

Because right now, my body is still in fight or flight. I haven’t slept for more than 2 hours at a time, and I’m lucky if I get two of those chunks in a night. It’s not jet lag. Or at least I don’t think. Especially since it hasn’t taken more than 36 hours for me to adjust to time differences and I have dealt with a lot of them in the many years of traveling. It could be homesickness, but I’ve been able to sleep for more than 2 hours even when I’m homesick.

Honestly, it might come down to the fact that, right now, I don’t feel safe here. Not physically, the bomb shelter is right there, but emotionally, and mentally. Somehow, even if my brain doesn’t know it, my body seems to understand that this place could hurt me, a lot, to the extent that I may never recover. Maybe that’s why everything in my body is screaming to get out.

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When I picked this program, one of my goals was to grow. To learn and change and evolve. I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about what that means for me. After all, I live in a world where pushing yourself is so highly celebrated. That’s generally a good thing, but in my black-and-white way, I feel the need to finish things, even when I absolutely hate them. It’s this strange sunken cost fallacy that has worked its way into every hard thing I do. Sometimes it’s a good thing, I get myself through a lot of hard experiences, and pretty much always learn something. Yet, it’s also made me shameful when things don’t work, which is inevitable when you’re trying new, hard things.

Right now, I feel I’ve pushed my boundary too far. I’ve finally found the level I cannot yet pass. Maybe it won’t feel like that in a week, but it certainly does now. And that’s hard. And this is hard.