“Avoidance” Or “The Trip To Scotland I Purposely Forgot About”

Today, while I had idle time on my hands, I went through the many hundreds, if not thousands of pictures I have downloaded to my MacBook, and I noticed something disturbing: I never edited nor uploaded any of the pics from my Scotland trip to my flickr account.

“What makes this so disturbing?” you ask. Or maybe a better question to ask would be: “What happened on the trip that made you NOT want to look through these beautiful photos?” Ahh… now we’re getting somewhere.

The trip was taken about THREE YEARS AGO with my ex (aka- the ‘X Offender’) and despite being in awesome and historic Edinburgh, I didn’t really have a good time. Why? Because I let my‘overwhelming emotions’ get in the way. Again.

Scotland was one of many countries my ex and I had visited on this trip. First, we flew into France, then headed off to the Netherlands. From there we took a boat to England, and later a bus to Scotland. After a few days up North, we traveled by rail back down into England, stayed a few days, and then flew out of London to go back home to Seattle.

Before leaving for my first overseas vacation, I had this dream notion in my head that we were going all over Europe, staying in hotels and bed and breakfasts, eating a ton of different foods, going to a million places, etc. You get the point.

Anyway, I got so wrapped up in this ‘dream world’ I had created that when I finally figured out this was not physically or financially possible, I got upset. It took me awhile to figure out the practicalities of everything because other than picking out flights and lodging as we went along, I never once took a moment to figure out the trip finances. I knew how much we had to spend, mind you, but I never broke down the numbers; I depended on my them-fiancée at the time to do it for me.

I was upset during different periods of our trip: some crying here, a little depression there… you know, that sort of thing. BUT in Scotland, it was a whole different ballgame. I actually had a little bit of a breakdown the first morning we were in town, right before we were planning to head out for the day. My emotions werecompletely out of control.

I’m not saying that I was doing absolutely insane and dangerous things during this breakdown, but I experienced more of what had become somewhat common for me by that point in time: uncontrollable crying, stupid (and endless) arguing, yelling, and the such. I remember feeling ashamed, helplessly depressed, and like I was going to ‘explode’. I didn’t want see or be bothered by anyone except for my fiancée, and so I held myself up in bed for half the day until I felt better enough where he was finally able to convince me to go outside– which took a hell of a lot of effort to do on my part.

…and so we enjoyed ourselves a little in Scotland, but surely it was more hell than heaven.

When we got home later on, I remember having the Scotland pics I took uploaded to my computer…. but I didn’t look at them until today, almost three years later. I didn’t really want to think about what happened on this part of our trip because there were more bad memories than good ones. Now looking back, I  am okay with it. I know what happened, but I’m not holding it against me, I guess you could say. I’m not letting the horrible memories and feelings of guilt override the happier memories such as walking along the beach after breakfast, collecting seashells. I’m OKAY with it all. It just took three years or so to get to this point.