I am preparing for a bit of a long car trip. I’ll be driving about two thousand miles, all told, over the course of a week, so I’ve been trying to get some things in order to make this trip happen in a way that isn’t going to destroy me. Primarily, I’ve taken my car in to get serviced. Thankfully, despite passing 111,111 miles just the other day and being almost twelve years old, there’s nothing really wrong with it. An oil change, a new oil filter, and an appointment to change out the weatherproffing seal around the driver’s door for after the holiday. Pretty small stuff, all told, and little enough that the anxiety I’ve been ignoring about needing to replace my car any time soon (which I absolutely cannot afford to do) has faded thanks to its clean bill of health following a full inspection. It is, of course, entirely possible that some significant issue is just one pothole away from bursting this sense of security, but I’ve been going to this mechanic for nearly a decade and they came well reviewed when I first started bringing my car to them. I trust their work and their thoroughness when I asked them to make sure I wouldn’t run into any problems during my holiday travels. I might still need to check the air in the tires since I prefer to put them at a higher pressure than I think they put them at (I like the top of the range of the acceptable tire pressure and they usually only fill them to the bottom), but I did forget to ask about that this time so I wouldn’t hold that against them.

With that sorted out, I just need to finalize my plans with the friends I’ll be seeing, find a pet sitter (I might ask my downstairs neighbor since I did the same for them a few weeks back), figure out how to get my laundry sorted out given that I’m currently planning to leave on the day I normally do laundry [I solved this by delaying my depature for a day], and then decide what a permissable level of “clean” is. I like to return to a clean apartment, and not just a tidied up apartment, but a properly cleaned one. I don’t know when I started this since I’m not sure if it’s something my parents also did or if I just dealt with my trip anxiety as an adult by cleaning my apartment (that was how I managed all of my anxiety for a long time), but I remember reading an article about someone who talked about their penchant for cleaning their apartment top-to-bottom before they wemt to conventions. It was interesting to read a thoughtful reflection–inserted into the middle of a discussion about some video game, I think–on a habit I held myself and had never really interrogated. I’d been so focused in my own life on the benefits I was getting from the pre-trip busywork that I hadn’t really stopped to think about how it felt to come home to a clean environment. Prompted by that article (I wish I could remember who wrote it, but all I recall in any detail is this introspection about coming home to a clean apartment), I realized that what I was actually getting was a form of post-trip relaxation. If I could return home following a long trip and not immediately have thoughts start popping into my head about what I needed to do around my apartment, I could actually keep relaxing and slowly get back into my normal routines rather than be immediately confronted with the work I need to do.

The biggest benefit of this is not needing as much post-trip recovery time. I can get home and just turn into a puddle for as long as I need to. Order in or eat some simple shelf-stable food (usually order in) and just let myself sink into my home after being away from all my familiar comforts for so long. And, in this case, after driving for fourteen to sixteen hours (I think it will be fifteen or sixteen real hours of driving but the timezone change will mean it is fourteen or fifteen hours on the clock). I enjoy a good drive, of course, and this is one I’ve mostly done twice already (I’ll be going to a different final location than I did last time), so I’m confident in my ability to do it, but it is still incredibly draining. I’ll have the benefit of breaking up the drive on the way out (I’ll be visiting another friend along the way) so I won’t arrive in too rough of a shape (it’s fifteen hours of driving cut up into approximately a seven-hour drive and an eight-hour drive), but my drive home is going to happen in a single day. It’s a bit easier to do that on the drive home than the drive to where I’ll be visiting because I don’t want to arrive at my friends house at ten, eleven, or even midnight, but I can get home at any time without needing to worry about disrupting anyone. Plus, the time change works in my favor on the way home.

As I’ve documented many times before, I’m not typically one to do much for the holidays, but I think I’ve decided to change that. I’m not sure how I’m going to change it, exactly, but I think I want to try putting in a little more effort now. Maybe it was my friends visiting for my birthday (the same people I’m going to visit for US Thanksgiving), but the idea of gathering with people to celebrate something doesn’t feel as emotionally thorny as it used to. It’s still a bit thorny and I expect that this year’s going to be rough considering all of the family stuff I’ve been dealing with the last month or so, but I think being able to spend time with my friends and chosen family will do a lot to assuage that feeling. I didn’t even think about the people missing from my life while my family of choice visited on my birthday and I’m kinda hoping something similar happens while I’m visiting them. It sure would be nice to be able to properly enjoy a holiday for once. Maybe, between taking antidepressants and having plans I’m actually excited about figured out ahead of time, this will be the year I actually enjoy the holidays. It was already the year I enjoyed my birthday, so it feels like a lot to ask for a second instance of celebratory rehabilitation, but it certainly would be pleasant.