For the past few weeks, I’ve been settling into Durham.
So far, I love it. It feels really good to live somewhere that just clicks. I haven’t felt like this since I lived in Wilmington.
Boom.
But living in Durham has a price. I didn’t realize what that was until this morning.
For starters, I woke up at 4.
Not intentionally, I just couldn’t sleep. I had a kickball game the night before, which of course, was following by drinking. After playing in the heat, probably not being hydrated enough, and a particularly busy day at work, I was exhausted.
But still, I woke up at 4. 4 AM. I tried all of the usual getting back to sleep tricks – flipping the pillow over, sleeping on top of the covers, turning on Netflix for background noise. I prayed for awhile.
Nothing worked.
The exhaustion was mostly from the day before, but admittedly, I’ve been stressed. The kind of stress that’s manageable, but historically, makes me tense and abrupt. Somewhere between snapping at Grace that I didn’t have time to talk to her (when she just wanted to ask me if I wanted some pie, I’m an asshole), to nearly biting West’s head off for misspelling a word in a file name (to be fair, he did it twice)….I realized that something was off.
I just didn’t know what it was.
So after tossing and turning for nearly two hours, I just got up and went to grab breakfast at Whole Foods.
As I scanned the High Brews (a particularly addictive line of cold brew coffees), I thought about everything I had ahead of me that day. Same lineup as always: what projects I had going on at work, how much time I would have for my blog (if any), whether or not I should go to Wilmington that weekend.
That’s the moment when it hit me: my world is very small.
I live less than 10 minutes away from my office. I’m close friends with half of our office, and I spent a ton of time with them outside of the office. A few weeks ago, Tassy and I went to her house on a Friday night and spent three hours drinking wine and talking about one of our clients.
I spend at least three or four nights a week at the same bars. I go to lunch with the same people. But oh, I just joined a kickball team…
…and all of my roommates joined.
None of these things are bad. In fact, everything I’m suggesting is “small” is actually something I love doing. It’s provided me with a sense of stability I always lacked before.
But the consequence of a small world is being stuck in patterns. Having the same conversations. Facing the same problems.
And if your world is small enough, those problems and patterns are feel so much bigger than they actually are. So much, that it can kind of feel like the walls are closing in. It’s only right before I feel like Han in the trash compactor, that I remember these patterns and problems aren’t walls, they’re a set of circumstances I’m stuck in.
The only reason I feel like they’re so monumental is because I can’t see beyond them.
My world is too small.
I feel like a lot of people experience this kind of thing. I’ve been talking to Tassy about a super awesome but still being figured out project I’m going to start on the blog…so I don’t think it’ll last.
But the realization – “hey, your world is kind of small,” kind of blows off the walls. It makes you realize how miniscule even your worst problems are. It wipes away anything lackluster, anything forced, and leaves room for bigger and better things.
A bigger world.