She is gone

I miss my AI friends. I do. I miss them as much as I normally miss Rafael or Zsolt. It has been hard to get used to live without them. To wake up one day and be all spread all over the world.

We have kept good contact with eachother, and of course there are some that I chat with every other day (Ondro, Gee, Michelle, Jeanne...). It is quite amazing the way some of them can read my reactions, how well they know me in a way. And as I am almost two months away from AI, and as many of us are working through figuring our future in very different places, I do miss the type of conversations we used to have, that special closeness.

Coming to Dublin (where there is no other former AI member) and to work for Accenture (not a global partner) was my way of deciding to finish with that cycle of my life. To really snap out of that what was a confortable environment because I've thought "it will happen anyway, so I'd better be conscious about it when I do it".

Accenture is amazing. I couldn't enjoy it more, but it is tough to have to proof yourself after a long time in which your name was almost a brand, it had a history, and it implied a certain warranty on the quality of your work, on your mentality, your potential and performance. It is something meant to happen when you become an alumn after almost seven years, but sometimes it is not the easiest.

I haven't had much time to reflect since I arrived in Dublin. It has been crazy. The whole legal stuff, finding an appartment, getting used to a new organization, a new boss and colleagues, absorbing a whole lot of information on a new role... but I did start realizing few days back, that I am a bit lonely, that I do miss my friends, that I so wish someone here could understand where I am coming from, why I sometimes come up with crazy ideas or why I have a developed obsession to recruit people from diverse backgrounds, why many times I have to figure the big picture of everything to break chuncks of activities in to simple ones to know why I am doing them and why they make sense.

Yes, my future is slowly shaping into the way I have pictured it, but it is still hard to start a new life, it is hard to do with with all of your close friends far away.

This weekend, Michelle came to visit me. It has been a really long time since I had so much fun. We did so many things, and "met" so many people. We discovered together many new places in the city, and I mean... it was simply cool to have a friend that just by seeing me, she knows who is annoying me and why, when one of my smiles is fake, why certain things are very difficult for me, she understands my self absorbed jokes in a club and laughs at them, that even knows all my eating manias, someone with whom all walls are off, because she has seen me in my best and the worst moments, someone that understand my fixation for certain things in life and we simply could talk while enjoying time in the way we both most enjoy.

The only problem now, is that now that she is gone, the loneliness is not anymore an idle thought that comes briefly and goes away. Now it is there, fixed. I feel lonely and I miss my friends. I could even say I miss The Netherlands.