While I live for denial, yesterday I realized that my long(ish)-term love affair with Freelance Fridays may be coming to a close. And it’s because I kept thinking that really every day is the same day, so, like, isn’t it today still? Did I really miss ANOTHER Friday?
Turns out, yes.
I missed two, not that counting’s my strong suit.
But right after that, I remembered that there are actually seven days in the week, and I don’t have to actually WRITE on Friday. I could write like, any other time.
So while I do consciously know that today is Sunday, hope springs eternal. I’m still calling it Freelance Friday today with the goal of getting my shit together by actual Friday to save face with the FF train that nobody even cares about but me because alliteration.
Do you ever have that general foggy-about-the-day-malaise, though? It’s like, a feeling that we’re all just living in one long day. Sometimes we break that long day up with naps or movies or house cleaning, but mostly it’s just the same day.
Part of me feels like the world JUST shut down, and part of me feels like it was never NOT shut down. I’m back at work, the same work, as I was pre-pandemic, which means that movies are starting to return to the big screen (hoo-RAY). I’m juggling a workout schedule with a work schedule again, which almost helps keep my health in check, because when you have ALL DAMN DAY to work out, somehow it’s harder to make happen.
But then, the weird reminders…where did this second functioning bathroom and out-of-nowhere second home office come from? How did I get all of these extra jobs, and how is it I can’t seem to finish any of them? I’m trying to wrap up all these contract loose ends. I’m still a coach. Do I just walk away from the things I began to do when everything I knew before vanished?
How do we decide who we want to be when these separate worlds begin to collide? The shutdown showed so many of us (dare I say, all of us) that we have a depth we only suspected before. We began to see things that work kept us too busy to notice, a vision that proved both dazzling and unsettling. The planet sang and danced and showed us its beauty when we weren’t trashing it every day, and we began to have the time to appreciate it. Conversely, society collectively freaked out, giving us a lens into this whole seedy underbelly of division as we were all forced to learn about ourselves and each other.
The return to normalcy feels so surreal, when there’s time to notice. When I try to think of a way to explain it, I keep remembering a scene in 1985’s Weird Science, when Chet, played to perfection by the late, great Bill Paxton, returns to his human self after an unfortunate stint as a revolting blob. He realizes that he’s back to normal, kind of pulls himself together (if you’ve seen the scene, heh heh), and very briefly weeps in relief. It was a similar feeling to my eight hours of downtime post-vaccine, when I went from chills and aches and wild dreams to feeling completely normal again.
How can we forget? Do we have to?
We don’t. Like any period of time in our lives, this will be a permanent fixture in the recesses of our minds, lying in wait to bring to the forefront, much like all of middle school. Time will continue to march from a weird, unbroken string punctuated with random sleep toward hundreds of “Is it Friday yet?” awkward conversation starters again. We’ll have to care about what the bottom half of our faces look like again. We’ll shake hands again. And, dare I say it, we’ll even hug again.
Isn’t it today still? It really is. But after a long time, we have the hope of tomorrow back. And even though I’m sleepy as all hell and Monday feels like a bad idea already…I’ll take it.
