A chance to explain.

I had a friend who once told me, “Your journal sucks when you’re happy. It’s more interesting when you’re depressed.”

Well, this entry is for you.

This was the ideal year for someone who only very recently made aliyah. A job, boy, apartment, grad school, all in one fell swoop. Chic chac. And less than a year after aliyah. That’s the dream of re-settling somewhere, right there.

And happiness is expected to follow all that, and a very warm fuzzy happiness, the unbelievable kind. Unbelievable.

And then I learned something: All of my friends who said they could never make aliyah because they could never leave their families – they had something to that.

I’ve sruvived away from my family for long intervals. Never was that hard. Maybe now it’s because I actually have something enormous to offer them: I have never felt more longing to be with my family than I have the past 3 months. It’s painful. There’s a large chunk of me missing.

And the friends, too. The people who used to mean so much, had such a large part of my life for themselves. They’re missing, and I miss them, or even at the very least, the memory of having people you are comfortable with, 24/7. A chevreh. A posse. I made a choice to leave them behind, but I guess I never thought I’d be left behind, too.

It’s weird how none of this has hit until now. I guess it’s not weird, because I’m supposed to be getting married and happy and it feels empty a lot of the time. What’s the point of this whole process if no one is here? I already have what I want: I share life with my lover. It would just be nice to celebrate that fact with someone.

And I know I made a choice to make aliyah. And I knew that I was sacrificing some pretty hefty stuff to do this. And I know that if it wasn’t worth it, I’d leave, and find some other dream to chase.

So, it must still be worth it.

But that isn’t lessening the immense pain I feel on a daily basis.

In a twisted way, I got something I long wanted: an actual reason to be depressed instead of just unexplainable rollercoaster mountains.