You know that spinning progress wheel? The one that just keeps going until you get fed up with it and you just ctrl-alt-delete and restart the damn thing? Life is that spinning wheel, but there’s no restarting the damn thing.
I just got back from an unplanned, drop-everything-and-hop-on-a-plane-it’s-an-emergency trip to Arizona to help my parents. So much has happened in those ten days that it feels like it’s been at least a month. It’s been the longest ten days of my life, by far.
I don’t even know where to begin, truthfully. My parents conditioned me to never air our dirty laundry, and the longer I spend with them, the more the conditioning starts to take hold again. And the ten days I just spent with my parents is more time than I’ve spent with them in four years… since before the pandemic. I’m grateful to have seen them and to have helped, but the return to “real life”—to my life here in the Bay Area with my friends and loved ones has been rocky.
Nothing feels real. Everything feels different, and I know it’s because everything is different, including me. Everything changes over time, but before I left, I was changing with my surroundings.
Now, I am out of sync and out of sorts. I’m hypersensitive and hyperaware. I feel everything, and maybe I also feel nothing. I only know I feel so small in a huge tumultuous storm of feelings and sensations. I am stuck—by choice—but all I can do is stay put, rooted to the ground, while everything spins wildly around me. Surely things will stop spinning if I stay still long enough, right?
And all the while, the wheel of life continues on.