Dystopia now

Since this was once my Dystopia diary, I recently had to think about how much my life changed in the past 3 years, or since the last normal winter, before things got kind of weird.

How about you? Has your life changed a lot?

On a longer train ride recently, I have (finally!) continued reading „The hollows“ – series by Kim Harrison and that had felt very nostalgic. It reminded of the countless train rides to classes and lectures or work, all with another one of these books in hand and probably a cup of coffee. When the time was right, I even stopped at a coffee place to sit there for one chapter or two.

I was always busy. I was always determined.
I had a goal in mind.
I never sat still, because I felt as if I had found the one thing I needed for my life to be good.
I had found a purpose.

And nowadays I cannot even get close to these things anymore.
To anything connected with it.
It still causes the same kind of stress that it had when my old world collapsed.
Although my life is full of new and different things now and, for now, kind of works out, I still feel the impact the spring three years ago had on me.

It seems as if somewhere along the way I have lost a certain kind of faith in things.
In general.
And that is not so easy to recover and does not work from one day to the other.
Or with one blog post.
With one wise decision.

During the pandemic, resilience has been discussed a lot in all kinds of forms. As part of my job as (translating complicated German job description here) I think “student research assistant” fits, I had to read and sort out sources on resilience for weeks, and I have already written down my own thoughts on this phenomenon.

Am I resilient when I keep doing the same things with the same outcome as I had before event x?
Or, am I resilient through changing my habit and changing the outcome according to the situation within or after event x?

Sadly, I wrote this particular post right before the war against Ukraine shook my world once more, so I don’t even remember what I said there. The outcome was lost in the next crisis.

Back to how much my life has changed since before the pandemic.

My goal that I had so clearly in mind was to become a teacher.
It does not sound super special, but for me this decision was huge.
Also, in Germany the journey to become a school teacher is long. At least 5 years of studying and afterwards a time for practical learning where your lessons are regularly observed.
It means at least 7 years of stress. And that is, if you are always up to schedule, what most of us are not.
Teachers have one of the highest burn-out-rate in Germany, as you can imagine.
I still loved doing it.
It gave me the special ingredient I needed to function from day to day.
I felt as if it had cured my anxiety to have this goal, this noble goal of helping others, in mind.
Also, I was successful in working with the children and really thought I was good enough – so, for the first time in forever I get rid of my fear of complete failure and never finding a job etc.
Another very important reason for this feeling so good was that for the first time in my whole life, I connected with my mother. She also works with people and always wished to have a degree allowing her to attend university (in Germany, children at the age of 10 are sorted into the degrees they later get and originally, only about 10% were even considered for university, while in my generation it has gone up to 40%) and become a teacher. Everything else that I had ever done had only confused her. My theater work when I was younger, my writing, my singing and violin playing, my photography, my specific interests in learning languages – we could never connect and through this we did.

It gave me a lot of strength.
I suddenly had something like confidence. That is rare for me.
This confidence helped me to find a lot of friends with a similar goal.
We studied together, we lived through this stressful journey together.

With my mother, I helped with a music weeks for children at the church where I grew up. It is okay for me since it is not a religious motivated project with a lot of people from outside.
There, I charged my energy twice a year.
Energy to manage to take this difficult journey I was on.

When with the pandemic my life collapsed, I had none of these things anymore.

I had not seen my mother for 2 years.
I lost contact with most of these friends.
I was not part of a community anymore, and suddenly, there was only stress.

Now, things got better.
I have recovered what is left of my circle of friends, at least a bit.
But emotionally, I am not done with those years.
When I told a therapist I was seeing for a while that just doing old things to have my old positive feelings back does not work for me, he stopped working with me.
I really felt cursed there, I have to admit.

I still so often remember how things felt like lose ends and how everything I ever believed in was taken away from me and I still had to function.
Because yes, that was what losing this community was like for me.
So, taking the final exams, working on that journey actually felt impossible.
It felt as if it was killing me, even though my results were (mostly) good.

I thought with everything I was doing, I had figured out a way to never feel this lost again.

So, when I tried to work as a teacher even after the worst part of the pandemic, I was reminded of pointless online lessons I gave to confused 6 year olds that made my whole body feel stressed.
I remembered how children were not considered for higher education because of their bad reading score, but they had not seen a teacher regularly for months!

I gave up the teaching job.
It is a relieve, but it also kind of breaks my heart.
I still work with people, for example in museums, and that works well for me.

But the way in which the pandemic changed my life is still not easy for me.

I am glad I summoned my witch and am writing her novel, but I am still searching for a more productive way to deal with reality, because the outside world tends to not shut up.