Out of Focus

After three weeks of absence, in more ways than one, I am forcing myself to write once again if only because my to do list has that one item left to do today. I’m a slave to my to do lists, and this is no bad thing usually. In my not so good moments, the lists disappear and oddly so does my capability to function properly. I

t has been three weeks since I accepted that life was getting a bit too much for me. The final straw that broke me was not being able to soothe the cracks in my hands which have developed from washing them and the repeated use of hand sanitiser. My skin was reminding me of lizard with scales, deep red cracks in places which seemingly would never heal.

As I’ve explained to many people, I don’t know if I am experiencing an overwhelming sensation now things are returning back to a normal-ish way of life. Or if I am slowly beginning to realise what the last year has been and recognising that things are changed beyond any way I could have imagined in 2019. I’m finding it hard to put into words the feeling that I had, not being able to think about anything which led to me laying in bed and sleeping for a large chunk of three days straight.

I’m feeling glad to say that the cracked hands have healed and I am back to almost no trace of the feeling of being lost I felt when I accepted I couldn’t just go on like that. Hugely impacting this was the lack on control I’ve had over the events in my life in the past year. If the pandemic never existed I would be coming up to a year married now, with a trip of a lifetime to Japan in the pipeline and working towards my next qualification. I am hugely aware of how my experience has been considerably better than some. I only speak of this to reference how life not turning out the way I planned impacted my mental state in this way.

How I described it to some people is that I felt like I’d lost my focus. Like I’d exploded into lots of pieces all floating around me and I couldn’t grasp any of them. Everything I had felt fairly certain for me had been ripped away, leaving me to focus on the increased workload of the pandemic. Now that slides away, hopefully for good, my focus has nowhere to go. Now I’m not short of a thing or two to do. I have a big to do list which is ever growing, but I lost the ability to see what was priority and was important. What could wait and what should be done now? I’m still not sure I even know, but I’ve managed to convince myself that by and large all the things could potentially wait so I might as well do the fun things first.

With that, my happiness returned and I began decorating my kitchen. There’s no deadline, there’s no tasks that need to happen urgently, just every now and then I paint a bit of wall. Or strip a bit of wallpaper. A little bit everyday towards the bigger project.

I think that this pandemic will have lasting impact upon the mental health of the world for years to come. Potentially decades. The differing experiences make it difficult to see what other people are going through but it should be recognised that we have all been affected by this in one way or another.

This blog post has been a little bit of a brain dump. It has been cathartic which was the point and it’s not my finest but it’s shattered the fear I had of posting something which wouldn’t live up to that. Take from it what you want, everything or nothing I really don’t mind.

MG x