Last Day of an Impossible Year

I may have become a little bit more superstitious this year. I am wearing a full-length linen dress designed all over with giant bright pink dots as big as saucers. Also a pair of coin earrings. Could use all the magic to bring in more than enough money to fix all the troubles that 2020 will leave behind.

The cold weather has my lower back in pain. It’s an old pain from having over-stressed my back when I used to do martial arts years ago. I have been unable to be as productive as I had intended because I could not stay seated for long, and my studio is so small and there’s not much room to move or stretch.

I turned to online courses (legs semi-stretched out on my bed, back propped up by pillows, laptop balanced on lap) because I could not focus enough to read. Whenever I would read, I would start to feel hyperventilation building up and then I won’t be able to do anything as the panic and anxieties paralyse me.

In one of the courses I rediscovered play and this helped me redirect my tiny doses of energy. Just play. No pressures of a goal or a perfect outcome. I realised that somewhere along the way the enjoyment, the play, and the enchantment have been pushed aside and away by the requirements of profit and productivity.

I haven’t really regained my full enthusiasm and energy for life since I lost all desire to even wake up in the morning by the middle of November. Even by then, I was only functioning out of a sheer sense of duty. I was already dead I think around July. Some version of hell was in full swing by August.

There were a lot of kindnesses though. So much generosity. But at what cost to experience them.

Now I’m back to being left alone and generally forgotten. I am nicely caught in that middle point where I am neither here nor there, this or that, and thus do not qualify for whatever the other extreme sides at least deserve to get. A mediocre invisible life. A heart that cares too much for what it wants. A spirit that withers so easily when forced to live opposite its values. Too stubborn and too sensitive at the same time.