Holidays again - how exhausting!
We are almost halfway through the holidays that I've been looking forward to for weeks now.
And once again, I find myself looking forward to the end of them, so I can have a break!
When will I learn?
I wrote in my blog last year about this , but I seem to have a delete memory button every time the holidays are over about it, and I'm like Dory - 'Ooh look another holiday, yeay, I'll get a break!'
I've got a reminder in my calendar every year, four weeks before the kids finish school in December, to remind me to tell all my colleagues (we are a group of small business owners, working in a shared office space, and we all have kids still at school) to get the last appointments booked and then clear their schedules, as the last two weeks of term are going to be a whirlwind of
- end of year events,
- Christmas card writing,
- deciding on teacher gifts, and
- school celebrations
And then suddenly - the kids are home for 6 weeks (it's our long summer holiday here in Australia), and we can't get anything else work-related done until mid to end of January!
So now I book it in, so that I don't make false promises to myself, or set unrealistic goals.
I remember back when my husband and I went on our first holiday together.
I never used to go on real holidays before I met him - I left home at 16, so every time I had a holiday, I went to visit my family. My mum had always done the same after moving away from where the rest of her family lived, so I didn't really understand people who spent hundreds (more like thousands these days!) to get on a plane and go and stay in a hotel overseas for two weeks. It wasn't that I didn't want to travel, it had just genuinely never occurred to me to do anything with my time off from work other than go visit my parents! So when we went to Malta for two weeks, and suddenly I was waking up every morning to my Extravert excitedly asking (picture Odie from the Garfield cartoons) 'What are we doing today?', and then once we'd done that 'What should we do now?', over and over again relentlessly until we got home again, and then I'd collapse in a tear-stained heap and wonder who stole my holiday?
So the next time we were planning to go away, I decided to plan in advance, by saying that we both have different ideas of what a holiday looks like (I understood that much, at least), so we needed to both agree that it was ok if we wanted to do different things on some of the days - ie if 'one of us' woke up one day and felt like relaxing by the pool (in the beautiful hotel we had spent ages choosing, for it's wonderful facilities), and the other person wanted to go off exploring, then that should be ok.
After a little bit of eye-rolling (having an Extravert partner is a bit like having a permanent teenager in your life I find), he agreed, and I felt much more relaxed about our holiday.
Since then, we have been on countless holidays, and every single time, I know I could just say I'm going to 'relax by the pool', but I can't deal with the disappointed teenager face I know this would result in, so I very rarely even suggest it, or if I do, I often 'change my mind', and go along to whatever adventure he has planned anyway....
And yet - every time we are coming up to a planned trip, I still look forward to all the lovely time I will have to
- relax,
- read,
- write, and
- sleep,
and then I do very little of any of those, unless my Extrovert falls asleep after a particularly busy schedule, and then I feel compelled to stay awake and do one of the above - even if it means staying up til midnight!
Add to all of this, we now have two teenage boys, and they seem to have hit that point of their lives where their main competition with everyone around them is to stay up until the latest possible time of night, so the chances of that solitude dissolves like a cruel acid bath before my (very sleepy) eyes...
So - what's the answer?
Umm, did I ever suggest I had those? I'm hoping to get them from the rest of my 'Introvertites' out there - that's the whole reason I write this stuff, to connect with others and hopefully create a community to share knowledge and learn from each other. I don't want anyone to spend 40 years of cluelessness like me - the earlier we can teach fellow Introverts about this stuff the better - save their precious energy in whatever way we can - united, from the keyboards of our device, at home, in glorious cocoon-like silence.
I still maintain that I love being married to an Extrovert.
The encouragement he gives me every day to do more , and have more outdoors adventures than I would without him around, is worth it.
I do need to get better at letting him know when my energy is running dangerously low, as I have a tendency not to, and push myself too far over the line, into the darkness of 'critically low battery' , but writing these stories helps remind me of this, and helps me remember to take care of my own energy, as well as indulging his!
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