“It just felt so… normal!” should feel good. It’s all we craved and put our plans on hold (well, most of us) for us to be able to say that. As much as we longed for it, I now hate it. I want to ban that statement. While I understand the sentiment and have been guilty of it, there’s a normalcy that I feel creeping in that seemingly is robing us of what we learned in the last year.
Here’s a few things that I feel slipping away in my world:
- The appreciation for simple things.
- The beauty of having plans and keeping them.
- Walks that made you see things for the first time.
- A check-in text from a friend you haven’t talked to in a while and you both have time to actually talk.
- The leisure of silence, a book or other activity that lets you be still.
- Freedom to be creative, just because, without any pressure for it to be anyone but for myself.
I said I wanted to emerge out of the pandemic a better person. What exactly that would look like I actually didn’t (or don’t) know. I hit the one-year mark of being in therapy and my therapist told me she is proud of me. Yeah, I lost (and made some) friendships. I moved. Adopted a dog, you know, you’ve been following along. Ultimately, I worked my butt off to be a changed person. I telling myself not to screw this up. Don’t waste this time. I didn’t. And I’m not about to return to who I was before.
I don’t know that I ever mourned losing whatever last year was. But I do feel myself keenly aware of the reemergence of wanting stuff, things to fill my life. An itchiness of discontent. Checking out of social media on the weekends has been a helpful way to cut down on the consumerism. Learning that about myself and my spending habits is something I learned out of the pandemic. Still working on that self-discipline.
I don’t want to get back to the world in which cancelled plans are exciting. I never enjoyed that to being with. Stop being flaky and commit to plans. (This flakiness I can guarantee you is showing up in other ways in life and it’s affecting people in ways you don’t know. I say this with personal experience as someone impacted.) I worked hard to show those around me that I cared and they showed that right back to me. We got really tight when we realized what was important. I don’t want to lose that.
In a way, the way businesses are so focused on getting us back in the office, skipping over the trauma of the last year and refusing to acknowledge the whiplash of life changing how we knew it then and now pushing us into a faux-normality of being back in person, hell-bent on forgetting, makes me realize, I need to remember even more. The focus on getting back to profits that mean forcing people to defend their health boundaries set in the last year, the refusing to acknowledge toxic work cultures. Life is not the same and the rush to pretend anything before 2020 was normal is not something I want to participate in.
If you having boundaries is upsetting that means they benefitted from you not having any. That includes those in personal and professional circumstances.
No, I don’t think workers are lazy as we emerge and there’s shortages of employees. I think they realized when they were pulled from their work environments and were able to spend time with themselves, their true desires came out and their current work life wasn’t it. Toxicity was realized. Boundaries set. More importantly, value outside of work was realized. You see I think a lot of people, like myself, are coming out of this with a better idea of how they want to live their lives. So in the last year they’ve set in motion the steps to create that life.
I’m one of those people. I’m putting in motion the steps to create the life I want to live.
While I still hinge on workaholic tendencies (we’ve put a pin in that to get back to in therapy once we get through some more pressing issues), I have never said no more than the pandemic. I didn’t realize it was legitimately going to take isolating myself to realize the power of no. I have set work hours now and the ability to walk away and not take my work like into my personal life (as much). Quite frankly I’m a better employee with these boundaries because I’m focused and aware of exactly where I want my energy to go.
I hope you feel free to say you aren’t okay. That the thought of just suddenly things being lifted actually scares you more than closing down. I can tell you that I am struggling with this. The small talk is even smaller and increasingly painful. Even more vapid than I remembered. We’re starting to get cranky and lose the .0001% of compassion we might have all learned at the beginning.
