Changes, Adjustments and the Challenges of Time Travel

I have returned to England after nearly three weeks in America.  The trip was significant in so many ways.  Most importantly, it gave me the wonderful opportunity to reconnect with friends and family.  The trip also helped me to realize how many changes I've gone through over the past couple of years: losing my job, selling my house along with most of my possessions, moving to a new country, getting engaged, getting married, moving to a new part of a country still new to me.  And sometimes it gets really overwhelming.  Since moving to the UK, I've been incredibly insecure.  I've experienced a total lack of confidence that is hard to describe to or explain.  It's a difficult thing for me to figure out and something I'm not used to feeling.  I've moved so many times, have gone through so many changes in life and have done so with relative ease.  When I arrived in America I felt a similar sense of anxiety.  Thankfully it quickly passed.  Before long I was my old confident, outgoing self.  And it made me wonder why I have such a hard time feeling that in England?  I vowed to bring it home with me.  And at first I did.  I felt so happy to back home with my husband.  But then, like a switch, the old anxiety returned - subtle and quiet.  As I sit in my studio writing this entry, everything around me feels foreign.  All of the great ideas I had such gusto to get on with when I was in America suddenly seem very distant.  As I was walking the dog this morning with all of these feelings  tumbling around in my skull, a thought more predominant than the rest came to me.  It was from my meeting a few months ago at the gallery in Oxford.  The gallery owner was telling me how he'd been reading a book on success.  He came to the conclusion that the key to one's success had everything to do with how well they adapted to changes in their environment.  I hold on to that thought as a sliver of hope.  I have always prided myself on adapting to new environments - it's something I've done all my life.  So why now, after so many life changes and successful integrations, am I finding it so difficult to get on with it? 

Immediately after I touched down in England I had a very different and equally perplexing thought.  It's one I've had before right after I'd picked up sticks and moved here in the first place.  What if this is all a dream?  What if my plane crashed and I was actually dead and these were the images that were coming to me in my last moments of life?  Like a dream.  They say dreams only last for a few minutes, even though they feel like they're lasting for days.  What if it's the same when we die?  What if this whole life I've built in England is a dream, manufactured from hopes and fragments of images I've stored in my brain from previous visits and pictures in photo albums?  I know it sounds crazy.  But I just can't seem to shake that funny way international travel makes me feel disconnected from life.  It seriously does feel to me like I would imagine it to feel to travel through time.  You want to travel through time?  Just hope on a jet plane.  Fly to a different country.  Walk around for a little while.  It might transport you to another era, but it can certainly land you in a different time zone and move you back and forth across time.  And the culture shock can serve as a satisfactory stand-in for that just-travelled-through-.