My encounter with this “ending of lockdown” experience started with the very welcome news that I had secured a new work contract (I haven’t had work since the end of March). I felt really relieved and happy and eager to get back to work, but also a kind of “oh shit” I didn’t get to do all the things I wanted to do during my lock-down lock-in.
I felt I didn’t get to use this time and new space in my life to do the things that had been so important to me before, but for which there had never felt like enough time and space. Some of these were basic things, but important to me – such as learning to play the piano (the “new” electric one that has sat unplayed in my home for several years now), and others were more complex, like the intention to share my writing which had felt like a magnetic yearning before. And others were as yet unformed and ethereal, an intention to live differently, etc, etc, etc…
And the feeling was that if I wasn’t going to “get them done” during this special lockdown time, if I wasn’t going to do these things during this extraordinary time, then I probably need to accept that they’re not going to happen.
Or accept that I like the idea of them, but I don’t actually want them.
Or accept that they’re just not going to happen for me. That I do not have the ability to make them happen.
And then I became aware of this awful sadness of a feeling of everyone else going back to their lives, to “get on” with their lives post-lockdown, and I would be back in mine, going back to “the not getting on with my life” feeling that mine has had for quite some time now.
And that feeling just compounded by virtue of the fact that everyone else seems to be “doing” their lives.
And I only seem to be able to observe, from a sideline.
And not actually actively take part in my own.
Being honest, I resented. I felt resentment, that everyone else has these lives to go back to. Because I feel left behind.
And life continues to whizz by.
I liked the pause setting that lockdown gave me. Partly because I didn’t have those feelings then. I didn’t feel on the sideline.
And because I felt really safe when life was on pause. I realise now looking back that I was able to get much more in touch with my self. The one who loves trees, and flowers, and the magic that lies in watching the spaces between the leaves as they move in the wind.
And I didn’t want life to “go back to normal”. Back to the constant onslaught of the sheer force of life moving and changing constantly. People going here and there. The bewildering lack of purpose to all this commotion.
But my reasoning was, “sure, this is life!” We have to work and earn and pay the rent and do these things. My reasoning was sure this is life.
And then what I thought was the worst possible thing happened – I lost the contract. 6 months work! In a recession! The contract would have taken me to December. In my head it was utter devastation.
Only I became aware that it didn’t actually feel like that.
There had been a change in me that I hadn’t noticed happen, and it enabled me to see this loss change from the worst possible thing to the best possible thing. Because it gave me the ability to see very clearly that in lockdown, unbeknownst to myself a decision has been in formation very deeply inside me
– I don’t want to go back to the life that I had.
Not just that I don’t like it – but I don’t want it. I don’t want a repeat of the same old programming back.
I want something else.
I want something that is in touch with my deep self.
And I don’t know what that is or looks like, but what I do know is that I am far away from the/a/this/my life my deep self wants. And I have no idea how to get there.
And I am scared that I won’t get there. Ever.
Because it’s far away from anything I know is possible right now.
And before, I would have believed that I am not meant to have that, I am not allowed to have that, I don’t deserve to have that.
But the decision has already started its formation – so those things don’t matter anymore. The decision has already been made that I am going to try.
And now I still have the questions. How am I going to get there? And I don’t know.
But that’s ok.
And I still feel sadness with the idea that I am not journeying along what feels like the same path with “everyone else”.
But that’s ok.
And really it’s just an idea, in my head – this path everyone else seems to be on. I am still here, and still with everyone else. And I am carving out my own path.
And I am beginning to see that I am not the only one doing this.