Okay, so, it didn’t take long for this title, Love in the Time of the Pre-apocalypse, to get a little too real. It was meant to be dramatic and a little funny. Apparently the universe took the joke and really ran with it. One blog post in and suddenly the word pandemic is not just a movie, or a board game, but a real-life global health crisis.
There’s no denying that 2020 hasn’t been the year we all envisioned when we closed our eyes and counted to ten on a balcony right before midnight on New Year’s Eve of 2019. When we craned our necks to see the fireworks, we weren’t invoking Robert Frost, some say the world will end in fire…we weren’t wondering about the Mayans and whether or not our ability to outlast their 2012 predictions would have an 8 year time limit. In fact, I distinctly remember thinking, “This year will be the best year yet”. The universe has a lousy sense of humour. Between now and my last (and first) post, four months have passed. Rona has been busy. We have not. Every day now, I remember to be grateful for the good fortune I have living in Australia. We’re ahead of schedule, slowly emerging from social isolation and easing back into an ever-so-hopefully Rona-free and normal life. However, hindsight’s twenty twenty (too soon?) and I’d like to get real about social isolation for a minute here. Because, no matter what it looks like on Instagram, it was far from a glamourous time. They told us to use the time to find peace. They didn’t tell us peace became the world hide-and-seek champion overnight. I tried really hard and sometimes I managed to grasp it for a while. I wrote a lot of poetry, buckled down into my studies, ran a lot of miles. As with everything, there were good days and bad. On the bad days, I was writing lies and illusions, staring at dissertations on a screen and wondering why I couldn’t osmosis information into my brain, going relentlessly back and forth on drafts of a story that was about as rotten as the dead whale carcass it contained, and trying, and more importantly, failing to quite literally out run everything; the loneliness, the frustration, the cold weather. My mood has always been directly linked to how productive I can be on any given day. This is already problematic in so many ways; it becomes more so in an environment in which methods of productivity are restricted and changed. I had one week of backwards progress and my body lost it. Sometimes, we can be so in denial about our stress levels, that our bodies have to step in and tell us that something’s got to give. Monstrous zits, headaches, blood pressure fluctuations, or in my case (and there’s no ladylike way to put this) it took a 24-hour stint of diarrhea to tell me that maybe I should take a weekend off. If I had to name the absolute low-point of social isolation, I would say it was sitting on the toilet stress-shitting liquid and trying desperately to convince myself that I was still a beautiful woman. This happened more than once. When I was little, I used to get stomach aches whenever something changed. Apparently now I just lose control of my bowels. I think I’d like the stomach aches back. I don’t think anybody, when sat down to talk about it truthfully, could say that social isolation was easy for them, but we have learnt so much about ourselves that we can only be better off for knowing. I have learnt that I need to check in with myself far more often than I have been, that sometimes thinking I’m absolutely fine can be the first sign that I’m really not. The universe has a lousy sense of humour and we can only hope that this little practical joke will be tired by the end of the year, but even if it isn’t, social isolation has taught me that sometimes to simplify things is the answer. Eden needn’t always be a garden in Paradise. Sometimes it can simply be a damn good song played very loud. This year, when New Year’s Eve rolls around, my wish will be simpler too. 2021 needn’t be the “best year yet”, it can simply be a year in which things keep carrying on (and, if the universe is feeling particularly generous after it’s somewhat cruel little game, a year in which hopefully I spend less time running to the toilet). Much love, Gillian
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Love in the time of the pre-apocalypseWelcome to my blog! And good luck to you. What you'll find here are the musings, anecdotes, and anxieties of a young suburbanite in the 21st century. Archives
January 2024
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