City mirror, Country mirror

I am back home, trying to find my bearings. On the one hand, I need to find them. On the other, I am thinking my current bearings, or the bearings I left a few weeks ago, suck.

I really am a mirror of sorts, the kind that absorbs and reflects its environment. What a different environment--physically, psychically--the Deep Red is. First, there's this laid-back and lazy and misty and breezy and lush and decadent mood to the place. Next, there is the energy and joy and love and angst and silliness of four children. Finally, there is the serious stress and dissatisfaction and anger and anxiety of my mother, my sister, and my father--bad enough individually, volatile when mixed. I absorb it all, each and every bit. This is the "zen" of me. My flexibility is the tendency to empathize to the point of losing any sense of my own perspective, needs, or desires.

Now this chameleon mirror is struggling to adapt to the old city surfaces, a home that suddenly seems unfamiliar and thoroughly unsatisfactory. Is my life a shambles or am I? Is my perspective skewed or is my life here really the barely glued together broken thing I am seeing it as right now?