Drinking The Kool-Aid

This post will probably have nothing to do with drinking, or Kool-Aid, but the phrase was used in my company by three different people today, and I find that interesting.

One of those people was my old friend from grade school, C., who I hadn't seen in a few years and, oddly enough, works in the same building that I do. If this isn't Jungian synchronicity, I don't know what is. She and I had lunch, and as I was telling her about my NYC adventures I realized how dark it all seems now. I mean, in my head, everything I remember seems dark, like the lights were always turned way down low. I did live there from October through April, the darkest months (thank you, day light savings...), and the apartment didn't get a whole lot of natural light, so in some ways it is not surprising that things seem dim in retrospect. But metaphorically, it was an emotionally dark time for me -- literally nothing seemed to go my way, whether it was my living situation, my job, or my relationships, even with my friends.

And so I'm a little weirded out by how radically things have shifted in just a few short weeks, to the point where I'm just waiting for the other shoe to drop. My living situation is just fine, my job appears to be one that I can be happy and productive in and yet not lose my mind, and old friends are turning up everywhere (even Utah!). My inner emotional drama from unrequited love has substantially waned, although I'd be lying if I said it was completely gone (the song "Where You Lead" by Carol King turned up on my ipod this morning, and I still squirm when I hear the lyrics: "I always wanted a real home/ with flowers on the windowsill / but if you want to live in New York City / honey you know I will").

Most strangely, I am starting to feel like "my old self" again - although I'm not entirely sure what I mean by that. A lot of it could just be that I'm actually getting 8 hours of sleep on a regular basis. The strange part is, I'm not sure how I feel about it. I went to NYC because I wanted to radically shake my life up, and now I feel like I've darted right back to my comfy spot. Granted, I appreciate my comfy spot a heck of a lot more than I did pre-NYC, but I have a pathological need for the NYC experience to MEAN something; I must LEARN something from it; I must be able to point to the scars and have some philosophical narrative to explain them. Leave it to me to have an existential crisis over things going well.