Some People Just Will Not Leave You Alone

I am someone who values alone time.  Greatly.  I love people, and I especially love my friends and family, but when I need to think, when I need to process, when I need to recharge- I need to get alone somewhere and get quiet.  Which is usually a good thing.  Except when it's not.  And when the something I'm processing is so big that I really can't do anything with it, being alone is not a good thing for me.

Several years ago, some things got really hard for me.  So hard that all the alone time in the world couldn't help me deal with it or process it.  I didn't know what else to do.  When I need to process something, I do it alone.  But processing alone turned into shutting down turned into forgetting how to get up and get out and join the world every day.  And there is a very good possibility that I would still be lying there, in a crappy apartment on a crappy couch staring at a crappy television, completely shut down and locked up in my own head to this day, if it weren't for two people who just wouldn't leave me alone.

Erin and Michael would burst through the door flicking on lights and flinging back curtains as they went, and they would tell me what I was going to do.  I was going to get up and go to the Grape and drink wine and laugh.  I was going to get up and go sit outside Common Grounds and read and guzzle coffee.  I was going to get up and go see a new movie.  I was going to get up and go on a road trip to Dallas.  They were loud, they were obnoxious, they were insistent.  Everything I was going to do involved getting up and going.

They would not leave me alone.  There was no point in arguing or trying to push them away.  I could explain till I was blue in the face that I didn't feel like getting up or going anywhere, that I was processing, that I didn't want to move.  It was all a waste of breath.  And breath was something I really couldn't afford to waste considering many of these arguments occurred with both of them sitting on top of me (and while Erin may be ridiculously, adorably tiny- Michael is kind of ridiculously, adorably huge).  Sometimes it got really annoying, but resistance was futile.  Michael and Erin simply would not take no for an answer.  They just wouldn't leave me alone.  They refused to give up on me.  And they forced me up and out of myself over and over again, until I was finally willing and able to do it on my own. Thank God for that.

They didn't make me talk, they didn't try to counsel me.  They just fought- so hard- with me and for me.  They were my will and my sanity when felt I had none.  And they made me, literally forced me, to feel better.  I don't know what I would do without friends like those.  The ones who insist on being in it with you, no matter how deep in it you happen to be.  The ones who refuse to let you stay there.  The ones who just will not ever, ever, ever leave you alone.