11.21.08, 5:00am

so, here i am. 5am. alone in the front room after 5 hours of sleep, and i feel pretty good. weird. i had gotten to the point where 9 hours wouldn’t have felt like enough. seems like maybe i’m getting back to my old self, but it could just be that i’m still not quite sorted out all the way, which is what i wanted to write about this morning.

i talked to a couple of different people about this last night, but i was still kind of processing it myself. when i was ‘on the inside’ (hee!) i built up this notion of coming home as all i needed. if i could just get back to my sanctum sanctorum, my home, the familiar things and people there would give me the security to be myself again the moment i walked through the door. i was fully prepared to come home, grab a quick shower and be myself again.

problem. i am not myself anymore. or more accurately, i am myself again but haven’t been in a while. so everything i see, everything i had been counting on to grant me security, is unfamiliar on some level. obviously nothing has changed here - i was only gone for 3 days - but everything seems different. i was ready for them to seem different (less threatening or burdensome than they had seemed when i left), but not for them to seem foreign. but i realized last night that for a long time now i have been looking at them through a very different set of eyes than my own, and now i’m seeing them for the first time as myself, not as some guy with a chip on his shoulder. i’m seeing them not as something to resent and as something that resents me being here, but as something of which i am supposed to be a part.

problem. i don’t feel like part of it, because i haven’t been. when i got home from my therapist appointment yesterday, grace and caleb were home from school already. i walked in, and it was like i wasn’t even here, or more like they had never noticed i was ever gone. and i think in a lot of ways they hadn’t. i’ve been gone a long, long time, i guess, and my kids had stopped missing me quite some time ago. brandie has missed me all along and is glad to have me back to some degree, but kids are different; kids are adaptable, and these guys just moved on. i’m trying to figure out how not to let that kill my enthusiasm and momentum for this new direction i’m on.