Spending the Holidays away from Family

The year 2018 was life-altering. This was the year that I went to four different cities to avoid being at home. I had two internships in two different states and I went to two different cities for the holidays.

For Thanksgiving, I went to New York for the first time and I must say, I had a major meltdown. My family posted all these videos and pictures and I couldn’t help but to notice... I’m the only one missing.

I received calls and texts from them saying, “WE MISS YOU!” and “I WISH YOU WERE HERE!”

All I could say was, “I know, I miss you guys too”.

I mean what else could I say?

I could’ve said, “New York is great! I’m having the time of my life!” But I didn’t because that’s not how I felt at the time.

I was incredibly sad on the inside. I couldn’t eat my mother’s food, I couldn’t get the annoying hugs from my aunts and I couldn’t laugh so hard that my stomach hurt from all of the jokes being told.

After a couple of hours, I quickly got over it because it was time to walk through Times Square.

Everybody knows that Times Square is one of the largest attractions in the world. People from all over come to NY just to see this place (as well as the Brooklyn Bridge... but we’ll talk about that later).

All the sadness I had was quickly replaced with anger and frustration. Having to walk through the crowds, abruptly stop because the group in front of us just HAD to take a photo and people being indecisive on what store they want to go to because there were SO many they wanted to get to.

I was ready to go after an hour of being in Manhattan because it was so overwhelmingly crowded.

Thank God we stayed in another borough because I would not know what to do with myself if we stayed there.

In hindsight, I actually enjoyed my time in NY.

So much so, I went back a week later (I’m not joking). And I stayed in the city that I called overwhelmingly crowded.

For Christmas, I went to visit my best friend who lives in Northern Ohio. I hadn’t seen her since July of the same year. To be quite honest, I did not want to leave. I had so much fun! I‘ve known her since my freshmen year but I've never seen her interact with her family. That’s when I realized that we had so much in common! We both don’t like taking photos, we’d rather binge watch shows on Netflix than to go out and we are content with happy eating.

Spending the holidays without your family is definitely interesting but I have a weird feeling that it’s going to happen again.

-N