December, 2020
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Day 366
I feel sad today.
I am not sure exactly why. It just doesn’t feel like the end of anything. It feels like … another day.
Yet here we are, at the end of 2020. A very long, very challenging, very difficult year. A year where people heard the word “No” a lot more than they were used to and it made them mad.
Welcome to the world of a chronically ill person. But … I digress.
I’m 41 now and I have been gainfully unemployed for nearly 4 years (well, mostly except for a few efforts on my part to rejoin the human race that inevitably ended). I’ve felt lost, drifting, unsure of what the point of my life is. No, I am not suicidal. But think about it sometime… the point of your life. It’s an interesting question. Especially for those of us handicapped in some way, restricted or unable to exist as most humans do.
Contemplating life is humbling. It’s grounding. It’s vast and terrifying and then, somehow, up lifting. To have this life on this planet and eyes to see it and ears to hear it … and a finite amount of time to do something with it. Profound.
So I ripped the bandaid off and shut down the social media on my phone (which has dominated my time this year) in an effort to exist fully in my life. To enjoy what I’m doing just for the sake of enjoying it, not for the sake of documenting it for others to see. I thought a lot about that as well — the motivation behind things I was doing. Was I riding the Peloton just because I love it or was I doing it to take a picture and show everyone else that I was riding the Peloton? ( With relief I can report it’s because I just deeply love riding my bike to nowhere). Anyway, that sentiment could be applied to so many things … and it made me feel disingenuous (whether I was or not). Most things I do I do because I love them, but I also felt compelled to visually document it, as though other people cared about my daily oatmeal habit. I want to just live, and create and read and discover and then, maybe write something that isn’t attached to a a picture on Instagram.
John and I wrote down our resolutions for the upcoming year. We were thoughtful about not over-stretching, but we wanted to be on the same page, so that our home and our life together was a joint effort. I look forward to exploring those in the coming days when I come back to this blog and just shout into the universe.
For myself, I want to finally sit down and practice the piano, I want to be consistent with my French lessons. I want to write. I really, really just want to write.
And, fun fact, whether I do or not depends entirely on me.
Happy 2021 World. May it be a year of moving forward, healing wounds and learning.
Xoxo, g
social
Recently, I put time limits on my Instagram. I realized that the amount of time I spent scrolling photos and crafting my posts was … absurd? Embarrassing? Just too indulgent. All of the above. So since I have no will power whatsoever (and especially at the tail end of 2020, a year rife with challenges) I decided to give the power to my iPhone. I get the ‘5 minutes remaining’ notification a lot. And I hit my limit pretty frequently. Sometimes, in a fit of self-pity and frustration, I tell my phone to ‘ignore limit for the rest of the day”. I always feel bad about that the next day. But at the time it feels essential.
Who have I become? What has our world become that we all ‘create’ our lives through social media instead of living them?
I toy with the idea of leaving social media altogether and then worry about missing updates and the ability to be in touch with my relatives and friends I don’t see as frequently. I have family on multiple continents, in many time zones. I don’t want to miss them.
But I also want to just live. Without worrying about how it looks, or how to present it, or what the anonymous world of social media will think. We don’t really talk anymore, we hear news in sound bytes and memes …. There isn’t intellectual discourse. There’s no time.
I have a week or so to decide the fate of my social media identity. I go back and forth. I waver. I feel afraid. But I hope that once I make my choice, I feel at ease. (And I stick with it!).
IG: simplygwyneth