Already at the end of January. Can’t believe we have a 1/12th of the year gone…!
We’re approaching a time of the year that saw my life turned a bit upside down in 2024. Change is, sometimes sadly, inevitable. In some situations it is sought, but perhaps too often, it’s pushed onto us before we’re ready.
Human beings are nothing if not adaptable. We built our entire species on it and yet, so very often, we go through it only reluctantly. It’s destabilizing, it can be terrifying, and sometimes – only sometimes – it doesn’t end well.
I personally don’t do well with uncertainty. Change I can do, provided a plan can be made to project adaptation in a nearby future. After all, I went from never having left my province, to taking several flights to Northern Europe, where I knew no one other than from the internet, and had only English as a second language to communicate. But a plan was established, and it was the start of a life-changing era.
Some changes are smaller, but no less impactful.
After a terrible year in 2022, I spent most of 2023 recovering mentally, trying to return to what had last felt like normal. When 2024 rolled up, I had what I thought to be a very solid foundation, and the year started up really well, too.
And then significant changes started happening. A switch in supervisors. In work tasks. In sleep patterns. In anxiety. Through all of it, I hung onto what I thought was normalcy – my routine, as much as the lack of sleep allowed. My daily habits. Exercising, seeing people. Eventually I had to take a break, with the intent to find my footing again and build, once again, a new normal.
But as stated previously : life is what happens when you’re busy making plans. Illness and an unexpected departure in the family at the start of autumn shattered my last hopes of returning to normal for the year.
Four months later today, I have come to understand that normal is never something you return to. It’s something you build over and over again. Sometimes the variation is almost imperceptible. But we learn from everything we go through, and those lessons, positive or not, model us into new versions of ourselves.
The normal that held us comfortably suddenly is all angles and bumps, and we have to reshape it, or remain in otherwise inexorable discomfort.
That is something I keep having to remind myself of lately, even now as I still slowly but steadily recover from last week’s norovirus infection. It felt like a wrench thrown in the carefully and precariously constructed pillars of the routines I’ve tried to build again, and as the recovery is taking longer than in previous such instances, it’s frankly annoying.
But, I am nothing if not adaptable.
I’m just also going to complain (to myself) the whole time.
Have a good start to February.