Ireland

Last summer, on the heels of a bad breakup, I took off for Ireland. I was incredibly depressed, and then got even more depressed thinking about how much money I had spent flying to Ireland to be depressed.

I bought a journal, parked myself in a bar in Dublin, and sat there coming up with 100 things I was thankful for. It took 3 days (Stop judging. I went sightseeing when I needed a break, so it wasn't 3 straight days in a bar).

By the end of the 3 days, I felt a lot happier. I don't know if that was because of the 100 Things List, or because of the cute bartender.

Everyone says that vacations are a great time to blow off steam, let loose, go crazy. I had never experienced that before. My vacations were always much like my university career: boring. Wake up at 5:30. Exercise. Complete items on schedule. Go to bed at 10. What can I say? I'm a creature of habit.

Ireland was the first time in my life that I actually let loose and lived like everyone else lived in college. It was exhilarating! Paul and I went out every night and walked around Dublin or drank Guiness or talked to strangers until 4 a.m.

I felt really alive, and I understood what I'd been missing all the years of being responsible and worrying about paying my rent and college tuition and buying a car. With Paul, I learned a different way of being. I felt free.

He wanted to try a long-distance relationship when I left to go home to the States. He reasoned that with my 11 cumulative weeks of vacation and his 6, we could feasibly see each other several times a year and FaceTime in between. I wasn't just an American tourist to him. Hmmmmm... None of the travel blogs I'd read prepared me for that.

I had gone back to being Responsible Elle, the girl who thinks through every possible outcome to any situation and never does anything without knowing exactly how it will end. I could see no happy ending to this. Paul was young. He was 4,000 miles away. He was surrounded by beautiful, drunken women all the time. And he was angry with the cards life had dealt him. I knew if I got involved with him, it would just end badly.

Even though I went back to being Responsible Elle, something in me fundamentally changed by meeting Paul. I got to find out all the things I had missed out on. My friends are all grown and married with children now, having sown their wild oats some 15 years ago. I never sowed any wild oats. Going to Ireland and staying out til 4 a.m. was turning over a new leaf for me and, in a sense, I've been aging backwards ever since I returned.

I don't want to be Responsible anymore. I don't want to have to know the end from the beginning...things haven't ever worked the way I expected anyway. I'm tired of going to bed at 9:30 and watching TV on the weekends with my cat. I miss Ireland Elle. And I wonder if I let something good go when I said goodbye to Paul. He was all wrong for me, I know. But all the "right" guys have been wrong for me too.