Annnd She’s Back With Another Rant 💁🏾‍♀️
By: With Maurice
Tags: Rant, Diary, Covid Diaries, Overcoming Obstacles, Blogger

SUPER sorry to add to the negativity train🚇, but I need to vent.

If only you knew how many attempts it’s taken me to sit down and complete that somewhat pitiful openening sentence. In fact, do you know what? Give me one second please. Let me just re-confirm how long it’s taken me to write that.

…One sec-ondddd…Bear with me por favor…

Ah yes, here we are! … Drum roll please 🥁🥁🥁 It’s taken ya girl a whopping SIX MONTHS to complete a TWELVE WORD sentence. I think there’s a word we have for that in the English dictionary…

P A T H E T I C!

The irony is that I’d been feeling so motivated after that last post. I was like “Yaaas! New blog who dis?!”

To date, My Reflections on #BlackOutTuesday (yep, you read that correctly, Black Out Mother Effing Tuesday) circa June of this year has been one of my most read pieces of content. I was so sure that by June 11th, at the very latest, I’d be posting again and happily rifling through and answering your comments.

Yet here we are, with Christmas in six days and the promise of a new and hopefully better year upon us…

Deeeeeep dramatic sigh

This is me deeply and dramatically sighing whilst trying to look thoughtful and cute

The thing is, I’ve slowly, surely and complicity relinquished my time to projects and people — i.e. work and “social life”, if I can even call it that — and in doing so, granted myself less access to…well…myself.

It’s almost as if I’ve tried to not only reach out to, but cling to the more social aspects of life that, let’s just be honest here, were never at the top of my priority list, as a direct result of limited social interaction being mandatory…in the most annoyingly blurry sense of the word.

It’s so strange, because pre-covid, I preached about my (very much still intact) introvert nature, yet, in a time where it feels like I’m being forced to live out a magnified version of my nature, I find it increasingly — hmmm, maybe difficult isn’t quite the word — but maybe something closer to, challenging? Arguably a synonym, but, you get the gist…right? 👀

And if you’re wondering exactly what I mean by a “magnified version of myself,” I guess the best way to clarify your curiosity — without getting into tooooo much detail — is to superficially (because I don’t even want to jump back down that rabbit hole) assess the common traits associated with my personality type and then address how I find myself wanting to act in opposition to them.

So, with regard to the (fitting) description of being “quiet, reserved and thoughtful”, due to living alone and working from home, I find myself wanting an outlet that allows me to escape the deafening silence. I find myself wanting to chat and specifically video call often. I find myself wanting to empty my mind of the million-and-one work or personal related thoughts darting through my head at every millisecond.

It’s like I’ve had a realization that “Oh, so I do like to talk with others about my thoughts rather than over analyze everything myself” or “Okay, there are times where I do actually get energy from others as opposed to just feeling drained by having too many energies around me”. Two things that are very interesting for me to observe, but then again self-reflection and self-awareness are (as an introvert) two practices/traits I’m very well acquainted with.

Upon further reflection, before I wrote myself off as an ambivert, I had been: busy juggling three jobs — a new significant other — a very last-minute anxiety-inducing move into a new condo — the repercussions of not being able to celebrate my 30th birthday with my family — processing the fact I’ll be spending my first Christmas away from them (I should have been boarding my flight home tomorrow, but our lovely pandemic friend ensured my flights cancelled) — among other things and this all contributed to the changes I was noticing within.

I constantly battle with myself because I sometimes feel like a “Privileged Polly” moaning about her “first world problems” or invisible mental obstacles, when people are out here really experiencing unfathomable financial hardships, due to this entirely mishandled corona virus. Not to mention the physically debilitating and sometimes even fatal consequences that indefinetly seperate people from their loved ones and not temporarily, as is the case in my situation.

It’s true that comparison is the thief of joy but in instances like these, comparison has been my source of perspective and a constant reminder of relativity and just how much I have to be thankful for.

This is not to say I take any form of pleasure in others’ misfortune, because I absolutely and categorically do not. Having said this, however, although it’s not always the most comforting thing to hear and by no means does it nullify what I’m experiencing, it’s just that I recognize the truth and in many ways, emancipating nature in the phrase, “things could be worse” — because when I look it my personal experience, things really could be SO much worse. Praise be to God that they’re not!

The fact is it’s been a horrid and bewildering year for so many people around the world. Although I didn’t escape the almighty smite of Covid unscathed, I can honestly, humbly and gratefully say that I am on the lower end of the spectrum when it comes to its disastrous impact across the globe.