“When for health reasons we stop being ourselves, what is left then? ”, I complain to my witch just when the cold and dark season is ready to arrive.
I am usually decorating a cake when the message I am dreading arrives. The pastry bag in hand, I read one cancellation after another. Of course, I understand that three of my friends spontaneously caught a cold. The other one has an issue with her youngest daughter. Yet another has to fill in watching out for a great-aunt, and two other ones need to relax after a taxing week at work. Then there is the one feeling rather old at 35 and complaining about sudden backpain. And suddenly, I have to figure out how to finish a whole cake on my own. “It’s not like this happened for the first time”, my witch admits as she selflessly joins me in eating the half decorated mess.
She is right. Ever since the pandemic began in 2020, I have not been able to get a grip on my circle of friends. Being very persistent, or in my darkest moments very desperate, I managed to see most of them once or twice, and I know that I still mean something to them, but that is all. One coffee a year, sometimes a Voicemail, and of course always short written messages about emotional exhaustion, their needed mental health break, and their general search for well-being. Because mental health is so important. Meanwhile, I often think back of the board game nights we have had up until 2019, and I am full of nostalgia. I even think of my last celebrated birthday right in January of 2020, and I wonder how we got here. But hey, I guess mental health is important.
It’s probably a mistake to date people you can get updates from the local news about, but it happened to me more than once. Recently, I read about a person once very dear to me, who had built up a very unique and locally successful career as an artist, but was giving up. The words used in their explanation were the same. Emotional exhaustion, stress, burn out. The times we live in are difficult. I agreed! But why give up on something unique that a whole life had been invested into? Well, mental health is important. Guess I can’t argue with that.
Or, can I? I think I can, and this is a rant.
There is a reason why I hate this new tendency to stop doing things. I myself have been in a state where I struggled to do the things that I wanted to do for years. I felt my state of health as a physical barrier between me and the world, It was a barrier that often held me back from finding the courage to do things, or from even feeling the happiness that I would have expected. It slowed me down for years. Still, I always wanted to find ways of doing things again. I searched for the right mode of functioning, for the right kind of spell, as my readers remember. While my brain wanted to trick me into giving up, I got furious with myself, because another part of me still believed in doing art, finding love, being fascinated by the world again. I was lost in a sort of colour blindness, and so I went on to search for the colours. It was not easy. It really wasn’t pretty. There were moments where I almost didn’t survive. But through all of it, I knew that I wanted to keep on being a friend, a girlfriend, an artist, a museum educator. I never wanted to stop being me, and I actively fought an illness that tried to trick me into doing just so. I was grateful for everything I managed to do, and deeply sad when really nothing worked.
I stayed active, because mental health is important. I think this new tendency of not doing things for ominous health reasons is the most dangerous thing. It stops people from being a friend, being a lover, having a personality, a hobby, a career.
“When for health reasons we stop being ourselves, what is left then?”, I ask my witch, as we open a bottle of wine halfway through the unfinished cake.
“Demons?”, she suggests with a giggle. “Devils, evil spirits?”
It’s this feeling of social collapse that makes us a witch.
I see social networks collapsing everywhere. Our generation easily cuts ties with families, which always hurts me as a disowned one that was cut out involuntarily by the boomers in my family. At the same time, we stop being a friend, and we don’t care about our careers, and everybody dateable is toxic. We are a society collapsing, because nothing human is being preserved.
“Cheers on never stopping”, I tell my witch as the sugar and the wine kick in. I had wanted to celebrate autumn equinox, but for the reasons mentioned above, everybody cancelled. I am 31 now, and for five years, I have been running after my friends. A colleague much younger than me, only 25 now, tells me the same. So, it’s not just that we’re over 30. It’s that we’re a damaged generation.
Mistress witch writes 