Spent some time reflecting on the way other people’s brains work today.  I’m having an incredibly easy time adjusting to the chaos this week, and I know that others are not.

It never entered my mind that I would not complete the 12 months of Remote Year.  Sure, I read a bit about leaving in the Terms and Conditions I had to agree to, but that was financial and seemed to make sense.  Unless something catastrophic happened to me or a family member, I would be in it to win it.  However, not everyone thinks like me.  Obviously.  Not everyone has had my experience of moving 5 times in 6 years, or living in NYC, or chugging wine from a bag in a frat basement.  My upbringing and experiences have crafted the personality and mindset I have today.  This personality may be ‘pain in the ass’ to some, but it’s all mine.  And I’m meeting people from all corners of the earth with vastly different backgrounds and ways of thinking, united by wanderlust.

I would equate this to the realization in college that people actually flossed their teeth.  Yeah I knew I was supposed to and my parents and dentist would tell me, but I really didn’t know that people did it.  And then my college roommate was super into it(nerd), and I was shocked to learn that I should have been doing that all along.    It’s things that no one talks about but everyone seems to do (I floss now, by the way.  I know you were worried about my dental hygiene).

You don’t know what other people do when they’re alone.  You don’t know what they do when they’re not posting on social media.  And even then, it’s the shiny exciting bits to portray a happy existence.  I doubt I’ll be writing a blog post about the first time I cried from being homesick, or go into details about the inevitable food poisoning.  I’m not Instagramming sad faces of the isolation I might feel when I’m a 12 hour time difference from my family.  Just because you always hear about the good doesn’t mean there’s an absence of bad.

So I’m over here on my Remote Year honeymoon and others are experiencing a week from hell.  The key is going to be us.  The participants helping each other.  Going out for a beer to vent about work, shoving food down my throat when I’m cranky, or staying in watching Netflix to decompress.  This isn’t going to be great every minute, but it will be great.