Interlude /ˈɪn.tə.luːd/ , noun: a short period when a situation or activity is different from what comes before and after it, according to the Cambridge Dictionary.
The word popped up in my mind when I had but a vague feeling of what I wanted to say in this post. The feeling is still vague, so I expect it will be another stream of consciousness ramble with the sole merit of quieting my head for a bit, while I try to pour it all into pixels. The urge to write has been there, numerous times, but the act of firing up the site and the effort of pouring thoughts into molds that can be recognized as words, which can be strung up to make sense and paragraphs… that seemed like a huge and largely futile effort. So I let it wilt, like a lot of other half formed neat ideas.
Time is like molasses this year. It stretches and condenses and makes everything confusing, even more so than usually. I have a hard time placing events and people on the timeline of my life, anyway. It works somewhat until the end of uni, as I can use the cycles of education to divide my life neatly into chunks of four years, so there is at least a rough outline. Then it gets a bit foggy, with wobblier references such as job changes, as they were. Fine-grained pin pointing is out of the question though, as is figuring out stuff that bears no direct relation to those things (like which year I took a particular trip).
When this year began, I had a list scribbled on my whiteboard wall. Several lists, with different headers, to be accurate. Like little creative projects (mainly revolving around cooking, aptly named “Project COOKING”), things I still wanted to fix/improve around my home (“Project HYGGE”), etc. This particular list was the hardest, most abstract, and most important of them. It bore the heading “Project FREEDOM”.
Glasses.
License.
Car.
Therapy.
Hormones.
I speak in the past tense, even though the list is still there, a reminder of what should have been, like all the others, and I barely ever get to cross something out.
Instead, new lists appear once in a while, of things I need to spell out and cross out, to know that I have indeed accomplished something. Even if those things are “shower”, “vacuum”, “clean kitty toilet”, the whole business of making sure I still have clean clothes to wear, broken down in digestable chunks: “laundry”, “drying laundry”, “bring up laundry”, “put clean clothes away”. There’s “unload dishwasher”, “load dishwasher” separately as well. Garbage disposal is broken down as well into “take out trash” which has the silent addendum of replacing trash bags, “fold&sort papers”, and “take out paper trash”. It has been a long time since I have managed to do all of those things within a single day. Objectively speaking, they probably take up half an hour, an hour tops, combined. I do realise that. Doing them seems to require more will or energy than I can usually muster.
The fact that I have been working from home since March, 4 days a week in April and 3 days a week since, has not helped much. With the unfailing regularity of an addiction cycle, I have regularly messed up my sleeping schedule during the 4 day weekends with re-reads of good things happening to other people, uninvested gaming and staying up late discussing nothings with people far away – close enough to call friends, far enough to shut out with the press or click of a button. On good weekends. On bad weekends, I just stayed in bed. I got up to use the bathroom, or to feed the cat, and clean its toilet. Eventually, late in the evening, to boil some ready made pasta, when the hunger and the hunger and dehydration headache got worse than my lack of energy to get up and do something about it. It is my personal accomplishment that I have not missed any days of work, though work has been its own little hell as of late. Missed appointments to accidental and intentional oversleeping, but I didn’t drop anything important.
Still, my state was apparently enough to warrant a friends’ intervention. I tried to keep at it, taking plant based pills that may or may not help, and shutting out the cat at night to try to get better rest. Had some moderate success there – he quiets down after a couple of minutes of yelling at my door. I wish my thoughts did the same, but they still keep me up, circling boringly around the same topics. Like the eagles around Prometheus, the mythology geek in me wanted to add, but there is nothing heroic or martyr like about me.
So yeah… the world stood still, and I with and within it. Assailed by fears which are not of my own making, stressing out over things that I can control even less than my messed up, or not messed up, or lacking, sense of identity (depends on which day you ask me).
I was forced to take all my leave, so no vacation left to do driving school. And it was during lock-down anyway. And am sort of loathe to expose myself, because I am not exactly a prime example of fitness, not that that would be a survival guarantee. So I didn’t bother about the glasses either, because why should I (who knew I would be so vain? not me). And living in a tiny village (they call it town) with poor connections makes it hard to find another job without a car at my disposal. And facing 2 hours on public transport to get to therapy is just… nope.
So here I am, wondering what exactly this is an interlude from… as I wasn’t doing much about it before, am not doing much now, and am not sure if and when I will be doing something about it. It’s just that life in general is a little more objectively fucked up now, as opposed to subjectively fucked up before. And of course, I am among the lucky few who can afford the hour cuts and pay cuts and working from home and ordering stuff I need online. I am not among those infected or affected or forced to take the higher risks, so it makes it all extra special whiny to my ears. And… I should probably just drop the line of thought altogether and try again for that “decent night’s sleep” thing, as I actually have to brave the world outside tomorrow.
