Border collie without a flock

I had a whole post idea here, talking about open-ended possibilities, in Minecraft and home remodeling and hypothetical lotto winning and planning a garden and creating art, and how the whole thing just makes me want to cry.

I have long thought of myself as a person who handles change well. I have taken pride in it. It turns out, I don't handle change well. What I THOUGHT was me handling it well was, instead, me having people in my life who were more upset by change than I was, and it was my job to mitigate their concerns.

Now that my kids are adults, I don't have anyone in my life whose emotional regulation is my problem.

This is great, it is great that my partner and I are responsible for our own feelings! This is an appropriate thing for a relationship!

But I don't know what to DO with all this time, attention, and executive function. I don't know what to MANAGE, or what to GUARD against. I have all this fucking ALERTNESS, and there is nothing to ALERT about.

Instead, I keep alerting on my own feelings.

A friend of mine once amused herself at a local convention when she realized that I kept trying to herd the groups of people going to a meal with my body language. She kept inching along the hallway in the "wrong" direction and then giggling when I would unobtrusively move around her to nudge her towards the door.

I am a border collie without a flock.

I fucking hate this.