this is not normal

I have filed away a lot of the ‘living’ I want to do right now for when I am older. I am not sure of how much older, but I guess it’ll be a feeling.

It’s frustrating to no end how so much of my life is pushed to a place and time stamp that isn’t here, that isn’t now. I have reached this point in my life where I don’t feel like  a person anymore. I suppose its unrealistic to want to feel like a person when you know that most of what makes you a person has been postponed to another time and place.

If you stay in survival mode for too long, every situation becomes something you have to survive, not experience. I find it difficult to come to terms with how every part of life has turned into that.

This pandemic for example. We have our fingers crossed that it will soon be over, constantly praying that it ends soon so we can get on with life. I hate all the crap about this being the new normal, nothing about this situation is normal. Not the illness, not the death, not the misery nor deprivation it has laid bare.

This. is. not. normal.

But how long do you cling on to this hope that it’ll be over soon, that you just have to survive this before things go back to ‘normal’?

The thing is, there is no going back to what was normal, because that normal never existed. It couldn’t have. This pandemic is just one of the things that has upstaged our normal, but there have been so many more.

Remember that loss. that death. it changed everything. you got over it, but nothing went back to normal, there was no normal to go back to.

Remember that person who walked into your life, and everything went sideways. maybe they stayed, maybe they left, but it didn’t matter because nothing would ever be the same. there is nothing to go back to.

It’s the same with this pandemic. there is nothing to go back to. we live in a constant state of flux, and we have just moved into a new one.

This isn’t one of those weathering the storm kind of situations in life. Even when this is over, it won’t be over. It will linger in how you meet people, how you express affection, how you open a door, how you accept a drink or how you extend a hand to a stranger.

This pandemic is an experience, a devastating, life altering one, but we must all live it as the only way to get through it, to move on to new experiences.

Survival mode inhibits experiences, it postpones all your living to when its over, but you can’t survive something that won’t end.