Security Blankets

Do adults have security blankets? I think everyone has things like that they need to have as constants in their life, but other people need them more than others. My sister Martha and I both had this thing where change really shook us up, not just emotionally, but physically. When I was 8 they put our house on wheels and moved it 70 miles to a different city. When I saw our house going down the road, I got sick to my stomach and threw up. Other major changes in my life after really got to me and I would absorb myself in books to to get past it. When I left for college/flight school in South Carolina, I came close to a nervous breakdown the first month I was there. I dealt with it by absorbing myself in an online message board, Military History Online, which was something I had become quite involved in at home. I was desperate for anything familiar to make me feel better. While I was in South Carolina I got my first laptop and started to get involved online a little bit more. Nowhere near where I am now, but just mildly. When I moved to a small college in Southern Montana for the Spring semester, I once again went through a hard time physically, but I got past it be finding that routine and sticking to the few things that were familiar. The same was true every time I moved to a new place or had a major change in my life. I clung to those constants and found a routine that I stuck to. As I started to have health problems and moved around a lot, I needed to have some steady constants and they became my computer, which connected me to an online community, supplemented by my phone, and the TV show Friends, which I used to cope with my insomnia and put me to sleep at night. I remember when I moved to Missoula, a once again completely unfamiliar place where I didn't know anyone, I started to get that physically sick feeling again, but I quickly overcame it by setting up my computer and my TV. After that, I was able to calmly build a routine around that. The same has been true for every move since then. 

Sometimes I wonder if it's a problem I have that I need to overcome, like an OCD thing or something, or if it's just a normal thing that I have that I'll just live with forever. Hopefully someday I'll have a family and they will be the constant in my life that will come with me everywhere and I won't need that "security blanket" that I've built for myself as much, although I believe I'll always have it somewhat. I thought of this tonight because I always go through a routine every night where when I go to bed, I move my computer from my living room to my bedroom next to my bed. This stems from the times when I lived in just a room and so would often use my computer after I went to bed (and also so I could get messages from people or they could wake me up), but in the last year or so, I haven't been doing that. My computer basically gets moved in there, sound down and screen dimmed, until I wake up in the morning and put it in my bag to go to work. Moving it from the living room to the bedroom is just an unnecessary move for me. Even though I have done it in the past, it's very hard for me to just leave it out all night. I was thinking about it tonight and it was just very unsettling for me to look up on my little desk thing next to my bed and not see it there. Is it my security blanket? I guess so. So I'm typing this on my bed, Friends on the TV and my computer sitting on my desk next to my bed. Until I decide it's a bad thing to have some security in my life, I'll probably keep moving it back and forth. That's why I have a laptop, right? 

Oh, and my backup drive is in here. I could move it...but yea, there is a reason for moving it in here. ;)