Cracks in the Photograph

So I'm back from Vancouver. Back in my apartment, back at my desk, back in Colorado Springs.

I have about a million thoughts and feelings running around but they all have one thing in common-change. Everything here looks the same but you can't go through an experience like this one and come back without so much being different. My view of myself and how I work, my relationships with my coworkers, the volume of new people I met, the friends I reconnected with. It's this crazy and intense three weeks where every little thing becomes a giant thing, emotions are all on the surface and then suddenly you are just back at home and it's all over but you feel like a totally different person.

I had a truly obscene amount of fun and I made new friends and came home with a few phone numbers (wink!) and I saw wonderful things but it was also so many long hours and not enough sleep and too much Diet Coke and not enough exercise and so many heightened feelings and you never know what day it is and you never get to do everything and see everyone no matter how much you wanted to.

And then you get home and you have all of these stories and like pretty much any experience, your friends want to hear a little bit but they DO NOT want to hear everything and really the only people who want to talk about it are the people you are just a little bit sick of after living/working/eating/crying together for a month or so.

I remember on our last night in Salt Lake, everyone was so tired and ready to be done that the office cleared out within about half an hour of the last skater leaving the ice. I was so young and I'm such an emotional little creature that I just stood there looking around at the empty room and feeling like my world had just fallen apart. I'm experienced enough now to know that we'll all come back and we'll debrief and we'll go to London to start scouting Team Processing sites, and we'll take the Olympic Team to the White House and real life will stop feeling anti-climatic. But tonight, while I'm sitting at my kitchen table watching my blackberry crackle with updates about medal counts and media advisories I can't help but feel a bit like my 25 year old self.

Still, it sure felt amazing to be EXACTLY where I wanted to be. I'm a lucky girl. A tired and worn down one, but a very very lucky one.