As I am standing in my shower with the boiling hot water running down my skin I hit a wall (important detail, I don’t like my shower ‘’hot,’’ I like it boiling, the type of shower that leaves your skin red. I know! I know! Not good for my skin.) Not any wall, an imaginary one. A wall that is keeping me from the life I want to be living. My head spins and I ask myself ''where am I?'' For some reason I almost feel like I’m in another dimension. Like most twenty somethings these days I watched that series on Netflix… what’s it called? Stranger things, yah that’s it. Well lately I feel like my life is an episode of Stranger things. Difference is; my portal to that universe isn’t a tree, it's my shower. In my alternate life there is no monster, I can assure you of that. Like Mike I feel confused, as if my life isn’t my life. PAUSEEEEEEE! Back in April I wrote a creative piece on Covid-19, this is a glimpse of that text. Is it crazy that 6 months later I still feel the same way?
This week as I was standing in line at the liquor store, I overheard this guy’s phone conversation. He was about my age (27). He was stating how depressed he was since he got laid off and felt like he had no purpose…Sad conversation but in this day and age it’s a ‘’normal’’ one. This is affecting my generation a lot! Not to say that it isn’t affecting other people, but most of us have just started our adult lives and our careers. Isn't our late twenties supposed to be the best time of our lives? That moment where you don’t live like a student anymore, have some financial liberty and so on. Recently, a few people (the Plan B type, refer to article titled Plan B for reference) have recited me fortune cookie sayings: everything will be alright, an exciting opportunity lies ahead of you, get your mind set...confidence will lead you on, you should be able to undertake and complete anything...BULLS***!!!! HELLO PEOPLE it’s 2020, there's a GLOBAL PANDEMIC?!?!? Now I choose my audience, I choose who I wanna share my feelings with and today I chose you guys. You’re cool, you get it. So no; I am not depressed, I am completely and utterly lost and if you are not and know exactly how to handle your first pandemic well congrats head to chapter 2! Sorry for my passive aggressive attitude in this alternate universe. My alter ego is blunt. I like her.
It’s 00:13 on a Monday night. I could go to bed, but lying next to my ghost (the life I was supposed to live as a flight attendant) doesn’t sound so appealing tonight. Thinking I could've been waking up in 5 hours for a flight to Sao Paulo, London, you name it. I am tired. But why would I go to bed? I don’t have to wake up early, I have no particular plans tomorrow. Some may say wow you are off, how lucky. When you’ve been off for 180 consecutive days, you need a day off from your days off (stole this sentence from my best friend who is in France living the same jobless situation, OH and I haven’t seen her in over 6 months.) Trust me when I say I’d love to have to wake up in 5 hours for a flight to Deer lake (a little town in Newfoundland, Canada) not to insult the place but this is to show you how I’d desperately go anywhere. It doesn’t need to be fancy like Paris. In this alternate universe, tomorrow, I have to take a few content photos. I love creating content, it allows me to escape. But it isn’t something new, I did a lot of content creation when I was still working full time. When I was working I would compare myself to Sarah Jessica Parker in the movie ‘’I don’t know how she does it’’. Okay, without the kids part! I would come back home from an overseas flight jet lagged, take pictures of products I had received in the mail while I was gone, do laundry, repack my bags then leave a few hours later to go god knows where. Not a minute to spare and I found time to do everything. Now that I have so much time on my hands, I can’t find the time to do anything. Being unproductive is a bad habit.
Why am I writing this? Well I got a trigger text. A trigger text is a text message that triggers emotions. It doesn’t take much to trigger me these days. Just when I thought (pretended) all was good. My friends texted that they missed me and missed our lives. The type of friends you don’t see often but when you see them again it’s like time hasn’t passed (this tends to happen a lot in the aviation industry.)
This is when I realised that at 00:13 on a Monday night I was not alone. We are never alone. Whether it’s the 20 something year old guy buying beer at the liquor store or the friends I miss dearly, we are all in this S*** together. Every emotion we feel somebody else has felt before, or is feeling as we speak, or as you read and as I type haha… Now that it’s 00:43, I will head to bed. Maybe tonight I will find my way back to my universe. I’ve learned my lesson now, isn’t that when everything is supposed to go back to normal? I will never complain again, I promise. I am ready to wake up now!!!!!
xo
C