As the months dwindle away in contained covid quarters, I have to say one thing… Life needs to be more fucking fun. Can we just take a moment to recognize how big of a bitch 2020 is and has been and stop acting like anything about this is normal?!
Okay.
Carry on.
Seriously though. I’ve been thinking about writing again for a while now and I’ve had a handful of things going on that I was procrastinating on, but fuck man. Life needs to be more fun and we need to remember that all this is temporary. This isn’t a new way of living. Does it suck, yes. Are we depressed, more so than usual. Are we anxious, you bet your ass… but if we actually listened as a collective we might not be killing thousands of people a week. Novel concept right?
As someone who’s always been an emotionally deprived person (as in any time I expressed my emotions growing up my parents either ignored me or told me how they weren’t acceptable in some way shape or form), I sympathize with people who are having a hard time in all this and want you to know that you’re not alone… Things like isolation and quarantine for any length of time are at first enraging and then just numbness abounds (to the point where you don’t want to leave your bed… at least for me). But the one thing that I tend to do far more often than not it seems, is take stock of my life. This year has really thrown us some curveballs, but we can definitely use them to do better in the future – not trying to be fake positive.
Now in the last five years of my life I went from my worst, to my best, to worse than my worst to limbo. We’re now in limbo. I moved back to NY and only spent about six months there before I ran screaming in the opposite direction once again. Now of course when I got back to LA I had a job lined up, started, and what happened like 6 weeks later… that’s right lockdown. After another 10ish weeks of remote working and no end in sight – because Los Angeles… I was laid off. This is now the second time I’ve been unemployed in the last 3 years. The first was in 2018 but lasted until 2019 which caused my move back to NY and less than 6 months later jobless again. Suffice it to say this isn’t my first rodeo on the unemployment express and this time without a doubt blows harder than the last time. Hokay – moving on.
Despite the fact that this year has been a rather heinous bitch, I for the first time in a very long time, have the time to focus on myself. I gained a bunch of weight after a broken foot a while back and the emotional turmoil of a cross country move (well 2, technically 3). I’ve been losing that baggage slowly and surely. I’ve been applying to jobs again, which anyone who has had to do this in the last 5 years knows its a royal fucking pain in the ass because god forbid a human look at applications. You’re also most likely to get a rejection letter six months later from a job you never heard back from in the first place just to kick you in the nuts once again. I am in fact a woman and have no nuts, so I’m really just assuming here, but let’s just go with it. And I have had a lot of time to read and I don’t mean subtitles on Netflix shows, though there has been no shortage of Netflix and chilling alone.
Not only have I been reading more books, but I’ve been reading the things I used to write (online and off). I did a lot of soul searching when I lost my job in 2018, but ironically its the information that comes from 2017 when I was in my soul sucking job that I really pin pointed what it was that I want. Looking back on all of that makes me feel like I knew myself better than I thought and the issues I’m facing now aren’t new, but I have the chance to change the outcome by doing it again. Which in this case is a wonderful thing because I refuse to end up back in NY and hating myself.
So naturally like many others I’ve done the quarantine cut when it comes to my hair. I did not buzz it off, well not all of it lol. I have been trying to grow my hair back out since a hair dresser over processed it almost three years ago and it still looked like crap in my own eyes despite cutting the ends off about a month ago (and prior). So I took my hair into my own hands and holy fucking shit balls was it satisfying. I now have a bob with an undercut that basically goes up to my eyebrows. I can hide the buzzed parts with the hair over the top or I can show it off with a lil tiny pony tail that actually works for me. I must say though, I’ve chopped my hair before into a bob and I wasn’t a fan of it. I did the bob again because I needed something different but I took it a step further because I hated the shape of the cut (which was the problem before). After the undercut I fell in love. This was probably one of the only hair cuts I can say that I’ve actually liked, enjoyed and haven’t had a ton of bad hair days. Being someone with naturally curly, big, frizzy hair, it had been completely flat and looking lifeless for too long. My curls even stopped curling and I don’t use heat or shampoo. But suffice it to say I want to keep this cut for a while and I’ve never felt like that after any haircut in my life. Woot.
Everything about this just feels freeing. It feels right. It feels like I’m giving myself the wheel to my own life (cough Jesus take the wheel – lol). It feels like I am actually being myself again. In a world of insanity and less than two weeks before the election that could pretty much screw my entire future should I stay in the US… I feel alive again. I feel like I can get through this. I feel like now is my time despite the bullshit around me to actually claim the life I want.
How funny is it to take a look around and see the world practically on fire (almost literally… LA is still on fire), and think okay here we go, its time… but that’s just the thing… 2020 like every year before it will end. The Pandemic will end. This bullshit will end. Yes we have a lot to recover from and yes it will take time, but in this ultimate pause of humanity are you going to do the best you can to be okay with yourself and maybe those around you or are you going to act like this is all normal and nothing can or will change?
Do you embrace the bitch so you can punch her out later? Or do you ignore her while she stalks you like a stage five clinger? The choice is yours at this point. To quote an old Switchfoot song, this is your life, are you who you want to be? I wasn’t for the longest time, but I’m about to be again.
Talking Over the World (formerly Diary of a Tactical Maverick) 