Sick bunny

A cold started moving in on me Thursday and now I'm feeling fairly unwell, though not as bad as I expected. The thing is is that I was supposed to go to Germany this weekend for the Christmas markets, so I had to cancel. It wasn't such an easy cancellation though...

I was going to the markets with a group from Meet in Amsterdam, an online-based group that plans all sorts of activities, a few of which I've gone to over the past few months. Two people started planning the Germany trip a couple of months ago and I was excited because I've wanted to go to the markets pretty much since my first winter here, but O has no interest in going and has refused to go. A couple of years I've tried arranging things with friends but that's never worked out. So this was a perfect chance. At first. As time went on and things got planned, I learned a valuable lesson: I don't really like travelling when the decisions are up to someone else. One by one things started to bug me about the weekend plans. The first thing was that while our original plan was to go to the markets in Dusseldorf, and that's where we'd be staying, we now were going to arrive in Dusseldorf, put our bags in lockers, and meet up with people from the Meet in Dusseldorf group, who apparently had no interest in going to their own Christmas markets and wanted to go to Cologne's instead. So we'd all head off down to Cologne and putter about their markets for a few hours and go to the Dusseldorf markets on Sunday. I had two qualms with this: one, I just went to Cologne two weeks ago, and even though the plan to go there as well was made long before I actually went to Cologne, now that I've been, I don't have much drive to go back again, especially not so soon; and two, our semi-managable number of 12 from the Amsterdam group was going to be combined with the German group to number close to 40 and I worried how on earth that was going to make for a nice little trip through the markets. I tried to be rational and tell myself that of course the organizers were going to make plans in case people got separated from the group, like saying we'd meet at a certain spot at a certain time, but I'm not good about being calm about these types of things and I fretted about this for an unnatural amount of time. I also worried about getting stuck with people I didn't particularly care for, which was easy when, out of the people going from Amsterdam, I only know about 7 of them, and only 2 did I consider friends. Again I tried to tell my worried mind to shut up and be open to meeting some new people on the trip, but it didn't like to listen.

As the weeks passed I started dreading the trip more than looking forward to it, which is such a bad thing to do when it was based in a lot of what-ifs. And I know that, I know how horrible my mindset got about the whole thing, but it's not something I can control very well. So I just tried to calm down about it as much as I could and not worry.

During this week, I sort of just wanted to get to the weekend and get it over with. Though maybe it wasn't the trip I wanted over with, maybe it was just all the unanswered questions about how it would go. Maybe it would all turn out fine, but I had to see that. I was quite anxious this week, really stressed about the trip, and then that carried over to me being quite stressed at work. Then I could feel that I was getting sick as Thursday went on, just a little soreness in the back of my throat that I knew was a cold coming on. Yesterday I felt mostly ok, but I decided, after a lot of debate, that I would email the organizers of the trip and say I couldn't come. When I first thought I couldn't go because I was getting sick, I did feel relieved, which is horrible, but hey, I was a lot less stressed on Friday after I said I couldn't make the trip. What was worse was my stupid mind then turning around and feeling regretful that I wasn't going now because I think I'd felt it was like a test to myself to go this weekend and have fun in spite of all my worries and show myself that I was being stupid. And now I'll not know what would have happened, and I'm kind of sad about that. But I really am not physically up to going out for two whole days and walking around in the cold for hours on end.

And now I have a new worry. I emailed the two people organizing the trip yesterday at 10:30 am. And I still have not had a response from them. My first thought is that neither of them got my email and they've been wondering what happened to me before going on the train an hour and a half ago without me, but I find that hard to believe when on other occasions I've had email replies from them within 5 minutes on a work day. So then my other thought is that they did get my email but didn't reply because they hate me now and I'll get an email when they get back telling me I'm banned from the group forever. But I think that's just me being paranoid and projecting all my worries out there because in reality they don't actually know all the thoughts I've had about the trip. Still, I'll feel really bad if somehow neither of them got my email and they come back Monday all pissed off at me.