Reality in Dystopia!

If you‘re rushing fast enough, you will stop to see colors, or to distinguish noises. Everything becomes a blur with no real shapes in it.
No real moments, no real experiences, and no real feelings.
That sounds quite, convenient, right? To just never engage in anything long enough for it to really leave an impression, a trace on the soul. To never think of something long enough to feel sad, or anxious, or to even risk real happiness.

„Yea, right“, my witch giggles into my hot chocolate. „We have recently seen how well that worked out.“ I take my most colorful mug from her. You summon your witch to always be awkwardly correct, right?

Thinking back to the very beginning of the pandemic, all the memories of not being able to sit still are coming back. Not being able to sit still and manically walking the fields during sunset.
Curfew?
Fuck you.
Rain? I don‘t care.
I have to walk. I have to run. I was getting text messages from friends celebrating not having to see their bosses, not having to deal with grumpy Professors in person anymore. One of them even wrote a very long paragraph to me about „enjoying slowing down“ very much.
Inside of me, nothing slowed down. I felt as if all my thoughts were constantly cascading, as if I was able to speak in five different voices at a time, and I was missing everything I had before that badly that I felt emotions that seemed out of this world.
If you have read my blog, you have read a lot about these. Not going to feature it here once more. Although I had been writing things for all my life, I started writing these witching tales to be able to put my thoughts somewhere, my feelings.
That was my new motivation to write when my reality had fallen apart.

„Reality right in your face“, I murmur into my favorite most colorful mug as a few drops of hot chocolates have found their way onto the paperwork I have been working on.
„You are sleep deprived“, my witch keeps mocking me. „You just had a fight with a bitch of a boss. You fell asleep sitting on the floor of a train stuck in traffic. You had cold Pizza for breakfast. Your precious reality seems to be back, right?“

Yes, by now it was back.
I did not feel tired. If you‘d ask me, I‘d say I could easily work for a few hours more, but there was a suspicious pain working its way up from my shoulders into my head right behind my eyes.
I think this pain means I am tired, I just choose to ignore the other signs of it.
No, that’s not me speaking. My therapist thinks that and I think he is right.
(Not really surprising that I have a therapist, I hope …)
Also, I should not feel hungry after a cold pizza and a hot chocolate somewhere along the way, but somehow my stomach feels weird, almost as if too empty after all.
Reality was back, I had to agree with my witch.
I was rushing so much again, I even stopped feeling my body at all.

No wait, when I was complaining about the pandemic destroying everything I ever had, I was also mentioning not feeling myself.
But that was different. That was feeling like the person I had been was being smashed to pieces and me not being able to find a voice to speak in. It felt more like not knowing who I was anymore. That feeling sucks. Don‘t ever go there with your thoughts, if you don‘t have to.
But actually, in that time without my precious rushing reality, helped me to get in touch with myself in a new way. Or maybe, with what was left of myself, because seriously, losing the performance I had trained myself to was fucking hard!
Within that time of „slowing down“ (I still hate that friend for introducing this term btw), I did not have a headache. I ate fresh and healthy things (except when drowning heartache in wine), and I discovered my healthy sleeping pattern sending me to bed at 4.30 AM until maybe noon.
And I wrote. I wrote a lot! Every thought I was having had to be put into words, had to be spoken out somewhere while I could not speak to anyone. Just surviving my own mind had become a plot I was curious to tell!

„When was the last time you wrote something you really liked?“, my witch keeps digging with her candle-light-questions and I frown.
„A month ago.“
„And before that?“
Shrug.

Yes, by now I wrote for the opposite motivation.
Not being able to mentally get to that point I had found within the pandemic meant that I was rushing again. Rushing away from myself. From being tired and feeling hunger.

In the beginning of this, I came to a hold with the shock of suddenly having to deal with unfiltered me and unfiltered me is tough to have around. I wrote to survive everything that I was thinking and feeling, and now that my reality has sort of come back (although still in a weird and dysfunctional pandemic version), I use writing to not lose touch with myself at all again.

“I still think it’s unfair”, I tell my witch, because this is also what you have a witching visitor for.
“Which side of it all?”, she asks.
“All of it.”
Being in stuck in these two extremes is unfair, you have to admit that, and fixing that is difficult.