We’ve been in the eye of a pandemic for almost two years now. It significantly changed everything in a comically short amount of time, and everything seems to keep changing the more time passes. Even more strange for me, is that it has almost been a year since we found out I have cancer.
All the activities and skills that seemed to come easy, or at least natural, BC – before Covid (and Cancer for me) feels weird and unfamiliar now. Did we really used to leave the house without masks or bring things into the house without sanitising them? Did I really used to be motivated to live and work out in the world, before cancer, without fatigue or a heavy heart? Why did I allow outside factors to become so significant, and stress me out to the point of having panic attacks?
I find myself wallowing in the slump of abnormality more than I care to admit to those around. It’s impossible not to compare how things are now with how they used to be. The things that weighed on my mind, I know now, were just much easier to plough through, deal with, and move on, probably because they were isolated external factors.
It personally feels like we are stuck in an in-between phase, like a vehicle stuck in deep mud on a road somewhere, the wheels keep turning, but going nowhere.
Matters that caused so much anxiety in the past, like rude clients or unrealistic expectations, I wonder if and how I can allow them to matter so significantly going forward? And then the things I never even thought of as being a factor in my future, like the permanence of possible cancer in my body, how and where do I make room for those things without them controlling my every thought?
I keep (and have for a long time been) waiting for life to regress back to the mean – to even out so that things can move smoothly for a bit without being an upward struggle or a wobbly downward slope.
But I think it already has – life has regressed back to the mean, but the mean has changed without anyone noticing. Things will never revert back to how they were “before”. The struggle now is not to brace for the storm, but learning to travel through it. Life won’t be uncomfortable forever. Taking care of ourselves while the hail bears down on our structures and the floods tear through our defenses should be the priority. At some point the sun will glimmer through the clouds and a rainbow will smile again. And we will once again be reminded of how things are better now than they were – different, but better…
Shattered Warrior 