Homesick? Or just tired?

Is it okay to be real about the fact that I’m losing the plot right now? Ha!

I am not some wonder-woman who cracks it out and gets shit done without fail 24/7. I don’t just breeze through life like a piece of cake. I am not immune to mental breakdowns. In fact, I’m only scraping by and figuring it out minute by minute, most of the time. Today is no exception.

I flew to Guatemala today, after putting it off for a few weeks to deal with family issue after family issue. There’s been WAY too much adulting for this chick. So this morning, Will and I woke up at 4am in Indianapolis to drive to the airport. Our “airport hotel,” which I booked for the shuttle and the pool, was a huge disappointment. The pool was under construction and the shuttle was nonexistent. Apparently they stopped offering the service and never updated the website. Go figure. That said, it was comfortable, cheap and conveniently located; it worked, shuttle or no shuttle. Luckily, Will was happy to volunteer to drive me to the airport. My knight in dusty Honda Accord. I would’ve been mildly screwed without him.

The flights themselves went without issue, aside from a small glitch with getting my boarding passes. Apparently my name looked funny to the quick-book machine (Hannah Miller? That’s a really complex name, wow), so it rerouted me to wait in line for assistance behind a couple on their way to Vietnam with NINE 50-60lb cardboard shipping boxes. Um. My only guess is that they may have been missionaries bringing food, medicine, school supplies, etc. It took a while.

I arrived in Guatemala safely. Everything is fine. My Spanish skills are coming back. I can understand probably 85% of what’s said to me – speaking back is a struggle. The work looks interesting. The coworkers are fantastic, welcoming, helpful, kind. The apartment is absolutely gorgeous.

And yet, I’m sitting in the kitchen, yet to unpack, bawling my eyes out and having a breakdown.

I don’t know, guys. I just sat down for a minute and everything hit me all at once. The family stress in Indiana. Mike’s death and all that last week in Alabama brought with it. How utterly alone I am here in Antigua right now. How much crap I have to figure out and plan in the next two months before I get home. How deeply exhausted I am. How much my feet hurt from dislocating twice today on the cobblestone streets. This pursuing your dreams stuff isn’t always easy. In fact, it’d be much easier to be at home right now, working a typical student job over the summer and saving money instead of taking on an unpaid internship.

I don’t write this to depress you. I want to be real with you. Don’t you get sick of those blogs where everything is sunshine and roses? I do. I always secretly wonder if the writer is actually a mental case trying to cover it up like the rest of us.

I also want to encourage you. Taking on big adventures is difficult. It’s okay to have a meltdown on arrival. To be honest, I think most of us do, to some degree. Most adventurers don’t show up and have everything running perfectly on touchdown. Culture shock can take our feet out from under us sometimes. Other times, we’ll finally sit down, breathe for a moment, and suddenly lose the plot. It’s normal. It doesn’t mean it’s time to give up and go home. I’m not going to. No matter how lonely and homesick I feel in the moment, I know that it’s just an ordinary part of a big leap. It’ll fade. Maybe not tomorrow or the next day, but by next week I’ll be back to my regular, chipper self. And in the end, I’ll be proud of myself for persevering and working through the hard things.

Tonight, I will play my violin, curl up in bed and cry if I feel like it, unpack, listen to beautiful music, and get this crap out of my system. And I’ll sleep, hard. Tomorrow, I’ll get up early, do some work while I eat breakfast, and then I’ll walk to start Day 1 at my (super cool) internship. Or I might take a tuk-tuk, if my feet still hurt bad. We’ll see. I’ll keep you updated! I promise I won’t be depressed always. There’s just been too much hard-core adulting lately. But we’ve got this.