Stream of Exhaustion

It has been an intense two weeks and I feel pretty shitty right now. I left for India on March 5th and made it to Chennai and then Trichy on March 7th. We stayed in Trichy for most of our time in India but spent one night in Puducherry and one night in Chennai on the way back out. The exact dates are in my notes, I don’t feel like pulling them out right now.

I’m back in my little apartment in Chicago, after spending the weekend in Texas with family at a cousin’s wedding. It was good to see people, not be alone and be forced to start talking about what the trip was like but it was also a struggle. We got food poisoning while in Trichy and ended up in the hospital for an afternoon. That fairly intense experience made an emotionally exhausting trip physically strenuous in ways I had not really anticipated. Then, my flights got a bit messed up and due to a series of unrelated incidents I ended up on the same plane for 24 hours from New Delhi back to Chicago which was awful. I know traveling sucks and complaining about it is about as boring as reciting dreams but there is a point, mostly just to say the intensity of the experience has made me feel unable to write.

Trying to be “present” in India during the trip while also documenting what was happening was enough that I did not feel I had any energy to write creatively, which was fine. I fell asleep most nights with my phone in hand trying to take down the notes from the day, hopefully these logs will serve as a strong basis for the creative writing that I’d like to do moving forward. As I continue to recover I hope to start putting out a few more descriptive posts that illuminate what it was like to be there and some deeper reflections on what i feel now, having gone.

For the time being I’ll say I am glad I went and I’m glad I am back. I did not get to meet my biological mother, but that felt like a long shot anyway. I did visit her village, see her house. I did visit my birth town. I returned to the orphanage, albeit reluctantly. I mostly feel thankful for the opportunity to have gone and am looking forward to focusing on moving forward, whatever that means, with the new information and experience I’ve had. I don’t really see this as the endpoint or milestone I had been envisioning before I went but a new chapter.

Blah, I am still so neausous and concentrating/staying awake is pretty difficult. I look forward to these feelings subsiding and some semblance of normalcy returning, hopefully within a week or so. Sorry if this post comes off a bit rough, no proof-reading was or review was done. It is time for bed, hopefully more in the next two weeks or so.