how you doin’?

Hi all

Long time no speak

It’s been quite a few months since I’ve posted on here and my apologies if you’ve been tapping your toes waiting for a line or two. I’ve had a million and one ideas almost every day of a new post I want to write, some of them have made it as far as the “Draft” stage on the back-end with a cover photo and URL; alas, none of them have been finished. Some of them were good ideas and I wish you could’ve read the words, seen the outfits, or scrolled through the photos that I had planned. But in the end they were just positive plans that lost their steam and then became moot because the time had passed. My blog is a space in which I (was supposed to) find joy, challenge, ingenuity, relief and escapism, but like so many of our house plants no matter how much I tried to feed it and give it sun I wasn’t getting my money’s worth.

I don’t want this to be a post that drones on about our current state of the world and the feelings that we are all repeatedly experiencing, but I’m tired. Nay, I’m exhausted.

Through my work I had visibility on the situation of Covid in Asia two months before WHO announced us into a global pandemic. Heading into the first week of a work-from-home lifestyle, and getting excited about making my own coffees in the morning and not having to brush my teeth until 2pm, I knew that this excitement in change was to be short-lived and I needed to prepare myself for the long road ahead. I’m a realist and I work along the timeline of a worst-case-scenario. For the first 6-months I can say that my mood rarely fluctuated (in terms of Covid) and I was extremely thankful that I was in British Columbia and not so many other parts of the world at the time. It wasn’t until the weather became cooler and I dug out my jeans that I couldn’t button up that the first precarious Jenga block was pulled from the tower of emotional stability. And then the next block when the sun set at 3.30pm instead of 5. And another when I would see some influencer (somehow) vacationing in the Caribbean while their home State’s case count skyrocketed. And two blocks at once when countless innocent people were being killed because of the colour of their skin. Every time I felt like that that might be the finishing block, I’ll see a headline about another new vaccine that’s been approved and I’ll recoup. Or when the power of the internet identifies and finds the culprit of a hate crime half a continent away I regain hope.

But as I learned in school, you end up using more energy when you continuously turn on-and-off lights, I was unknowingly draining myself of my gatorade. Knowing that we were still very much in the thick of it I had tried to not get my hopes up but it’s hard to do when the news is talking about rolling out the vaccines and your friends are gung-ho about their rescheduled weddings and holidays.

Right now Canada is in the middle of the third wave of Covid, including Vancouver. We aren’t quite back to square one as per March 2020, but this life of half-in half-out, can I go there or can I not, and why can I do this but not that, has become tiresome. The local and global media coverage of the pandemic has also caused a wave of the “other”; my bubble is safe but not theirs, or “look at that group of people having a picnic - I would never” as I invite my best friend round for a movie night. I (and others, for sure) have become a little more judgemental as we compare each other’s decisions, situations, actions, and interpretation of regulations (because that’s a thing). It’s a part of our being that many of us won’t like and we most definitely won’t be analysing ourselves with the same lens. But I’m aware that it can’t be helped when my friend ‘over there’ lives in an area where virus levels are low and steady, while mine continues to escalate but lockdown laws haven’t seem to have changed.

As I write this I’ve clearly done exactly what I said I didn’t want to do - I’ve gone and whined about my (our) problems. I’m so over Covid. But amid the never-ending coverage of how many people have been vaccinated (woop woop!), and seeing a celebrity fly to yet another tropical island because money buys everything (ugh..), I hope that you find some solace through my moans. It’s okay to feel mad and frustrated, downcast and impatient, desperate and fatigued.  Out of the plethora of learnings I’m taking away from this experience, the need to not have to apologise for one’s feelings sits high on the list. 

The UK has lifted its restrictions and I can feel the smiles of Londoners emanate through my phone with every pub garden photo that’s been posted since. I’m happy for them, I am. But I’m also scared for them. I don’t want to imagine what it would be like if we were all celebrating too early and become house-bound once again. I don’t think any of us could take it.

I’ve been extremely fortunate to receive my first vaccine just a few days ago, but the only moment of ease I’ve felt was while having my celebratory ice cream after my appointment (and even then there was the risk of the tummy ache after). I’m part of the way there to being protected, but my friends aren’t yet. The next time I’ll be able to go to a music festival crammed shoulder-to-shoulder with the next dehydrated person along won’t be for another long while. How will I react when I can fly my way to a new postal code and not have to use all my vacation days just for the quarantine there. Will ever break my newly adopted habit of swerving 2-metres away from someone on the sidewalk.

This is where my thoughts are at and perhaps what I needed was to put it down in words - do a full circle to re energise so I can get through the 2021 episode of this century’s pandemic. 

Talk to you later x