Penny Post #23: CLT @ 3AM

What do I do in an airport at 3AM? I write a penny post.

It is 2:56 AM and I’m sitting in the Charlotte Douglas International airport awaiting a flight to South Bend, Indiana in approximately three hours. Okay, it’s technically 5:56AM EST, but my brain, body, and soul are PST and thus I’m thoroughly fatigued. I caved and bought a venti iced chai tea latte. So I’m having a better three am than most. Especially the lady who disembarked my last flight extremely intoxicated, threatened to call her lawyer, and was escorted away by policemen. By all accounts and purposes, I’m having a better three am than her.

I’m still exhausted, nursing a strong migraine, and frankly, questioning how I ended up here. As you’ll know from last week, I’m going back to school. And by back to school I mean that many of my college friends and I are journeying to South Bend from various corners of the country to reconnect. We haven’t collectively seen each other in the months since graduation and staying in touch has proven difficult. This trip seemed obligatory - a natural arc post graduation and transition into the “real world” to come together again at the place we all met. An obligation I was willing to heed until now.

3:04AM in the Charlotte Douglas International Airport.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

I love my friends, I really do. They are some of the best people I’ve ever met. But damn, I’m vaguely wondering what is worth this. [If you’re a friend and reading this know I love you and I do think you are worth this]. Yet at three am (okay, six, technically) in the Charlotte Douglas International Airport where my company is the whirring of the moving sidewalks and the slow milieu of yellow-vested airport staff, I can’t help but wonder.

The wondering is because I’ve spent years questioning my needs. Years actually ignoring them. Needs of rest, of nourishment, of H2O. The basic stuff. The stuff if you don’t get you wither away until the need becomes so unignorable you hate yourself for fulfilling it. The years of ignoring my needs has resulted in both a battle to understand why I need what I need and a severe distrust in anything that threatens my ability to fulfill my needs. So me, taking a red eye with a three hour connection to fly into South Bend where the expectation of rest is slim and with another long travel day on Sunday before a full week’s worth of work, leads to distrust.

Who are these people that are asking me to ignore my needs? Who am I to listen? [If you’re my friend and reading this, know that I know you didn’t ask me to ignore my needs, I asked such of myself.]

This is something I really struggled with in Spain. My ability to discern my needs - at a time so crucial to my heath - was halted (in some cases enhanced) by a foreign language, the expectation to travel every weekend, and a community that wasn’t (yet) my own.

While still in Spain, I wrote:

I came into the semester chronically and terribly burnt out, feeling extremely heavy among all that I was carrying. I had great hopes that this new country, language, and people would carry everything I no longer wanted to. Just as the wave swallowed me whole and spit me out, so too has Spain.

This semester has been the realization of several of my greatest fears, but in that way, has been the ultimate growing experience. I went into a dressing room for the first time in many, many years, and a dress that I had forced to fit me did not, would not, unstick from my body and come off. After twenty minutes of blinding panic and impressive contortionist movement, I was forced to call a friend into the dressing room and see my shame on display. With her help, the dress did come off, but the damage was done. Several weeks later, after a lovely weekend trip to Portugal, I woke up with several bouts of simultaneous diarrhea and vomiting. It was not pleasant, yet even in my ill solitude, I managed. I triumphed over my continually invasive and debilitating IBS. I bore down and did the hard thing. Nothing in the past two years has been easy, but in Spain, there is no comfort nor familiarity nor privacy. So the harder thing becomes harder with its companions of discomfort, newness, and visibility. I've turned towards suffering. A nearly impossible battle considering our collective hedonism. Yet here I am. Turning towards suffering. I face the wave with the courage of a thousand times before when I turned away, unable to see the thing that might hurt me. I see you, wave, and I know you might hurt me. But I also know to turn away from pain is to turn away from an ocean magnificently blue, unbelievably vast, and stunningly powerful. How could I possibly deny myself this? God's complete, wondrous creation.

I’ve turned towards suffering. I didn’t have a choice. I could stew - which I did my fair share of - or I could try to glean some kind of meaning from the suffering and beyond that: be grateful for it. I’ve lost some of that spark now, as being grateful for pain, trying to find the silver lining with every discomfort, ache, and bout of vomiting that leaves me in bed for the rest of the day is understandably difficult and exhausting. But I also know that to turn away from that pain is to turn away from all else that accompanies the pain: the goodness, the companionship, and Notre Dame football goddamnit.

Therefore, I am here. It is now 3:34AM (ahem, 6:34 AM) in Charlotte Douglas International Airport and the silver lining is this:

How lucky am I to have the resources to travel cross country to visit friends that I love (including the sweetest pup, Rolo) at a place that formed a large part of me? So freaking lucky. Thanks for the reminder, Kiera. Thanks for reading, friends.

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Despite the urge to, I’m not going to apologize for who I’m showing up as today in this post or in South Bend. Part of my brain knows this long and weary post is the result of delusion and three-am-in-charlotte-douglas-international-airport brain, but bear with me. The writing willed itself here. And I listened.

Until next time,

Kiera