I came across this meme today. I’ve kind of wasted the day a bit – scrolling through 100s of memes on one of my librarian networks, having an afternoon nap – somehow the last week seems to have caught up with me with a bit too little sleep and quite a lot of work.
I found this funny in a way, it expresses the last year for some people quite well, but when I looked again, I realised it wasn’t really my reality. I had to laugh at the last “step” because in my case it was a step down, and ended up being more significant than a lot of the stuff that had gone before…
But I don’t think I over-reacted – when I broke my ankle it was more a sense of resignation and “let’s get on with this, how can I continue to be high functioning while sitting with my leg stretched out in front of me for 2 months.”
I’ve had this conversation with quite a few people in the last months / year. I don’t really like revisiting past traumas and difficulties. Before I had children I went through some pretty intensive counselling to deal with my “stuff” which cleared most of it out, and then doing some MBSR, meditation and the 10 day silent retreat took most of the rest of the load off. Not to say that some things and people are not still pretty triggering, but it’s not the huge rock it could be. And then I will acknowledge my privilege and say the pandemic has been crappy, but not as crappy as it could have been. Part of that due to being able to ride most of it out in Switzerland for the first half of 2020 with my son, and part that the rest was in China where it was pretty much a non-event for the majority of the 20-21 school year. I still didn’t see my husband for 7 months, and I’m now going into 13 months since I last saw my daughter.
The thing is, and this may be controversial, but I don’t really like revisiting and re-picking over the past that much. I don’t think it’s denial. I liken it to when you’ve scraped your knee really badly as a kid and you have a huge (in your mind) wound that then scabs over. If you disinfect and treat it and leave it to heal, it generally is fine, and leaves a bit of a scar as a reminder. But if you keep picking at the scab, it keeps re-opening and bleeding and may reinfect and then you have a mess on your hands. I feel sometimes that’s what we’re doing with the last year. I’m ready to move on but a lot of rumination and picking at the scab goes on around me. And I don’t quite know, and can’t always politely extract myself from the conversations. I think we also do too much of that with kids, and I’m not sure it’s that healthy for teenagers to ruminate rather than find constructive things to do. Do you think that’s just avoidance?
There is that Buddhist concept of the “second sword” – a warrior gets stabbed by a sword and gets injured but recovers. But then keeps ruminating and remembering the incident – they liken it with then creating new self-inflicted sword wounds on oneself.
The mystery meat has been replaced by suspicious fish in the last two days – they take up a lot of space but are mainly bone and skin and other fish parts. The crochet blanket is at about 1/3 progress and the fruit supply is now at a count of:
- 7 bananas
- 18 apples
- 5 peaches
- 5 pears
- 3 mangos
Getting mangos is about as close as I can get to hitting the fruit jackpot these days – they’re delicious and the perfect sweet snack. Know what I’d really like right now – a nice big juicy butter avocado – like the ones you can only find in South Africa.
Now I need to continue my Adobe Illustrator course – it’s pretty good – on lesson 11/23. I have the video going on my iPad while I try out the stuff on my laptop – can anyone tell me why Adobe doesn’t use CMD to multiple select like every other Mac programme?
Informative Flights - Musings of a Teacher Librarian 