On being pushed

 I guess the new thing now is to insist everyone snap their fingers and get past what they experienced the past two years. For one thing, there's this article from INC claiming that "languishing is over" and that it's time for "post-traumatic growth"

And then, this Ted talk (couldn't listen; one of the commenters on the site where I found it described the speaker as having "a Simpsons voice" and they're right - I read the transcript instead) talking about.....getting past the pandemic. But not really giving a lot of advice other than I guess you're supposed to play Mario Kart with farflung families and....that's not something I can do (don't have the console, couldn't afford one right now, don't have a lot of people in my life who'd want to do that). 

But yeah. I don't think it works like that. (TED talks have been criticized for often being simplistic and facile, and I think that's a valid criticism).

I will say one thing: I miss "flow." I don't experience it a lot any more. I guess I did, more, in the past? I don't really remember. Oh, sure, when I was a kid and I was playing or writing stories or sewing or something like that, I would get that. But it's been a while now. Part of it is that I've become a lot more distractable. (Could the pandemic cause something like sudden-onset ADHD?) but also I find a lot of times, especially at work, there are other tasks that come up and drag me away from the task I might WANT to be doing - all the assessment stuff, or getting an e-mail where information is urgently needed, or something similar. And the "time confetti" effect is very much a thing - my days do get fragmented and I think that experience at work has begun to bleed over into home life so I'm more prone to jump up and go "wait I need to do laundry" or something similar just as I'm sitting down to knit. 

Entertainment is even harder. I think the pandemic hiatus of a lot of things just got to me - so many things too are either still re-runs or else the "good" content is on some streaming service so either I cut cable (and have NO over the air tv, because I live in nowhere) or I pay twice for programming (cable AND streaming). As I said before - I really miss shows with some kind of narrative, with characters I can care about and story  lines that feel like a narrative arc. Perhaps because the past couple years were such an endless meaningless Groundhog Day sort of life, maybe my sense of things-meaning-things got a little broken; I know some days I don't feel like my life "means" something in the way I once felt it. 

I can get a LITTLE bit of that when I take Sunday afternoons and sew, but there are other things that pull on my attention - laundry or other house chores, and I usually do my workout in the afternoon as Sunday is one of those rare days I *don't* need to be up and out the door at 7, so I don't bother to set an alarm, and I have to get the trash down to the curb before it gets dark, and, and, and. 

I don't know. Maybe it will take me longer? That's always my issue with timelines for things; they're very one-size-fits-all and I think the fact that I've experienced *several* griefs before and during the pandemic times, and that I had an experience of a minor-league friend-betrayal during it - I'm just a little more wounded than some of the others, perhaps, who didn't get sick or lose a close loved one to COVID.  And I think also very much the feeling that I really am in this alone, with no help but myself has affected me. (I still think of summer 2020 and how I essentially spoke to no one face to face from mid-March to mid-August of that year). 

And another thing I can tell: I am still much more sensitive. I feel the negative interactions more than I did formerly; I don't brush them off as easily as I did. I suspect part of it there were a few weeks before the vaccines where literally the only interaction I had was a negative one (someone being pretty rude to me online even as I knew this was a person given to rudeness to others; a clerk at the Lowe's yelling at me for  going in a door I was not supposed to even though the door was not marked and I hadn't been there since the before times) and the fact that a year or a year and a half later I can still remember those - well. (I also read recently that "you require at least five positive things said to you to erase the memory of every negative one" and that feels true to me). 

Also the comment in that first article, about people "Coming out of the pandemic stronger than ever" and I'm sorry, but I doubt that will be me. It took a lot from me and it really soured me on a lot of my fellow humans, and I don't think I'm getting my trust back. 

What would "fix" me? I don't know. I did counseling for a while but I don't know that I got past the point where "okay I'm pretty much functional again" and I got tired of paying for it and I don't have the TIME to do more, not when I'm getting home a lot of days at 5 pm. Maybe it's just time. Maybe I'm NOT fixable at this point and this is, to use a phrase I loathe, the "new normal " for me. (I loathe the phrase because it's one of those whitewashing, peeing-on-your-leg-and-telling-you-it's-raining phrases. "New normal" is ALWAYS worse, otherwise they'd call it "an improvement"). 

Some kind of big success would fix me, maybe, but I don't know that I have the motivation to try to take on a research project that might not pan out (especially given that I'm teaching four classes, prepping a new class for spring, serving on a hiring committee, and doing my other usual stuff). Maybe finding a good close local friend would do it, but I also don't expect that to happen - there's not a lot going on (like through Meetup or similar) I'd want to take part in, and I also realize I'm different enough from a lot of people here that I'm viewed by many as an eccentric at best, and at worst, either pitied ("something must be wrong with her since she never married") or as some kind of vague threat. 

So maybe this is my new normal? Alone an awful lot, kind of unable to feel the excitement I once felt about hobbies, or the feeling that my job meant something to the world? Or maybe it just takes me longer? I don't know. That's a question I hate, though - "Is it just taking me longer, or am I broken?"

I mean, I'm less broken than I was in December, and less than I was (best I can remember) in late 2020. But I'm not who I used to be, and not - it seems to me - in a good way. 

But yeah: hearing the "we're ALL BETTER now, time for post-pandemic growth!" hits me just as badly and painfully as "well, during the LAST plague, Shakespeare wrote "King Lear" and Newton developed The Calculus" because I look at other people and feel like they're doing....more or better or are happier or have more love in their lives than me, and I also look at being 53 and I hear the Eternal Footman snickering as he holds my coat, and (to mix the metaphor even more painfully) I almost want to break into a chorus of "Is This All There Is?" (And yeah: maybe some of this is just a very infelicitously timed midlife crisis, but I don't know how a woman has a midlife crisis these days so I just kind of....walk around feeling like I am and have wasted my life and that's no fun, not compared to the stereotypical midlife-crisis man from the sitcoms, with his convertible and his suntan.....)