Black and white visions, in echoed halls
Feb. 12th, 2021 03:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dolorosa_12I'm not having a good week, or really a good month.
I feel, rather irrationally, invisible, and I can't figure out why. Nothing much has changed in my life from one month to the next, so I'm confused as to why what felt normal (and indeed even welcome) about lockdown life in December (November, October, September, etc) suddenly feels intolerable in February.
It may just be the accumulated months, and the weather. February is the worst month of the year in the UK, in my opinion.
I opened up Zoom to teach a class yesterday and suddenly had this intense and overwhelming realisation that I did not want to be teaching the class online, and that I wanted to be in a classroom with all the students. This was the first time I'd had such a thought in eleven months of teaching throughout the pandemic, and it hit me like a tonne of bricks. It was an incredibly distracting and intrusive feeling, and it made it really hard to keep my train of thought throughout the class.
Our only friends who live in this town are likely to be moving soon, as one half of the couple has just got a new job, and they'll eventually be moving. They've basically been our entire Cambridge-and-surrounds in-person social life for the past two or so years, and although I knew they were looking to leave in the near future, I didn't expect it to be so sudden. Due to the pandemic we haven't seen that much of them in the past year, and I had been looking forward to being back in the same town, but sadly since we moved in December the extent of that has been ... them dropping off food on our doorstep.
I've always maintained that I'm a homebody — working from home delighted me, and I don't tend to need a very extensive in-person social circle — but something about our friends' impending move away hit me very forcefully. They're basically the last remaining people from the group of friends I made during my postgraduate student years in Cambridge — the time of my life, which (overlapping with the years I first went online and became part of fandom) kind of saved me. So I guess I can see why the whole thing is bringing up a lot of difficult feelings.
Compared with last year, I also feel like I'm completely drained of the joy and energy which led me to be so chatty and present here on Dreamwidth. People who've been around for a while might have notice the lack of Friday open threads, minimal comments from me on their posts, and a complete inability to respond to comments in what I feel is a timely manner. I feel like a ghost, haunting the corridors of Dreamwidth, drifting from post to post, imperceptible and silent.
I don't really know what to do about all this stuff. I had a long and mopey FaceTime call with my mother and sister this morning, during which time they gave exactly the advice I would have predicted from both of them (my mum: join some kind of group devoted to a specific hobby, and meet people that way; my sister: here is this meditation app that I use). I appreciate the sentiment, but I don't feel in the frame of mind where either of these things would be helpful (from past experience, trying to expand your limited social circle when you're feeling mopey and down about yourself as a person is a recipe for disaster).
I want to go swimming. I want to walk among the trees, in the sunshine. I want to feel the community and connection of a lively comments section here on Dreamwidth. And until I can do these things, I think I'm going to continue to feel invisible, ghostly, and diminished.
I feel, rather irrationally, invisible, and I can't figure out why. Nothing much has changed in my life from one month to the next, so I'm confused as to why what felt normal (and indeed even welcome) about lockdown life in December (November, October, September, etc) suddenly feels intolerable in February.
It may just be the accumulated months, and the weather. February is the worst month of the year in the UK, in my opinion.
I opened up Zoom to teach a class yesterday and suddenly had this intense and overwhelming realisation that I did not want to be teaching the class online, and that I wanted to be in a classroom with all the students. This was the first time I'd had such a thought in eleven months of teaching throughout the pandemic, and it hit me like a tonne of bricks. It was an incredibly distracting and intrusive feeling, and it made it really hard to keep my train of thought throughout the class.
Our only friends who live in this town are likely to be moving soon, as one half of the couple has just got a new job, and they'll eventually be moving. They've basically been our entire Cambridge-and-surrounds in-person social life for the past two or so years, and although I knew they were looking to leave in the near future, I didn't expect it to be so sudden. Due to the pandemic we haven't seen that much of them in the past year, and I had been looking forward to being back in the same town, but sadly since we moved in December the extent of that has been ... them dropping off food on our doorstep.
I've always maintained that I'm a homebody — working from home delighted me, and I don't tend to need a very extensive in-person social circle — but something about our friends' impending move away hit me very forcefully. They're basically the last remaining people from the group of friends I made during my postgraduate student years in Cambridge — the time of my life, which (overlapping with the years I first went online and became part of fandom) kind of saved me. So I guess I can see why the whole thing is bringing up a lot of difficult feelings.
Compared with last year, I also feel like I'm completely drained of the joy and energy which led me to be so chatty and present here on Dreamwidth. People who've been around for a while might have notice the lack of Friday open threads, minimal comments from me on their posts, and a complete inability to respond to comments in what I feel is a timely manner. I feel like a ghost, haunting the corridors of Dreamwidth, drifting from post to post, imperceptible and silent.
I don't really know what to do about all this stuff. I had a long and mopey FaceTime call with my mother and sister this morning, during which time they gave exactly the advice I would have predicted from both of them (my mum: join some kind of group devoted to a specific hobby, and meet people that way; my sister: here is this meditation app that I use). I appreciate the sentiment, but I don't feel in the frame of mind where either of these things would be helpful (from past experience, trying to expand your limited social circle when you're feeling mopey and down about yourself as a person is a recipe for disaster).
I want to go swimming. I want to walk among the trees, in the sunshine. I want to feel the community and connection of a lively comments section here on Dreamwidth. And until I can do these things, I think I'm going to continue to feel invisible, ghostly, and diminished.
no subject
Date: 2021-02-12 03:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-02-14 01:33 pm (UTC)