Support System - We all need one

I have a confession to make: I need a support system. I need the voices and words and encouragement of my loved ones to make it through the trying times in life. Whenever I am really down, and I can't sleep and I'm in a bad way, I'll wait up til my Mom is about ready to leave for work in the wee hours of the morning (right around the time that Jesus is getting ready to go to bed), and I'll call her to unload some of my troubling thoughts. Sometimes I'll phone my Dad and talk to him for a while - he's often pretty good for a laugh, and he reminds me not to be too hard on myself. I also miss talking to my s.o. - we talk so frequently that he's the one person who I pretty much count on as a steady presence.

Having the ability to text has pulled me through on a few occasions, but my ears always strained to hear a human voice that I could easily recognize and easily understand.

One of the main things I've been struggling with is being disconnected. It took some time to be regularly connected to the internet, and then even more time to get a mobile number. During all of that time, I hadn't heard the voices of any of my loved ones. When I finally figured out how to dial out to America, hearing Isaac's voice on the other end made me realize just how homesick I was - and how much I'd put off feeling homesickness. But once I recognized that being in touch or out of touch could help or hurt my state of being, I couldn't un-know that.

I have a second confession: being out of touch made the troubles I faced that much harder to bear. I could not just pick up the phone any time and speak to my mother. And emails sometimes were too tedious (they didn't relay my feelings in the right way) to send. I needed real-time reactions. Talking to one of my best girl friends on video chat (when it is possible) has seemed one of the best things to help even out my experience. But imagine, that's only 40-some minutes out of 7 weeks....

We all need each other, to varying degrees. It is often the people around us that keep us going, and give our lives deep meaning.

So, stay in touch, even if you sometimes think you don't have the time to do so. You never know who needs to hear from you, and who you need to hear.