the old normal

Just got the first dose of the Pfizer vaccine yesterday. Second dose scheduled three weeks later. Then I'm supposed to wait another two weeks for it to count. My mood has been looking up, though fragile and fraught with anxiety. Sad thing about the pandemic making me miserable is that it's really only forced me to live the same way I have for most of my life. This misery is an awful lot like "who I really am." I'd spent the previous two years trying to get away from being me. I don't want to be me anymore.

I don't believe in that whole way of thinking about the self anymore though. There is no me. There are just neurological patterns I've become accustomed to over the course of my life, largely developed during childhood, and then all the environmental and physiological reasons those patterns developed, and continue to be reinforced. 

So, to change who we are is just a matter of figuring out which aspects of all that we can work with. Going to college was a dramatic shift in environmental factors, but our patterns don't change that quickly or easily. It's gradual process over the course of our lives. "Who I am" was not changed all that much. It was incredibly easy for me to go back to doing absolutely nothing. Back to reinforcing deeply entrenched patterns I'd been fighting for my life to change.

In retrospect, "I could have done this, I could have done that." I understand why no one understands. It's so difficult to see any actual impairment. "Just do this, just do that," makes sense until you're in the moment, not doing any of it. We think we're free to do anything we want, until we find ourselves doing no such thing.

It makes no sense for me to be all pollyanna about getting back to "normal." This is my normal. That's the problem. Covid was a setback, and I don't know how much of one. Getting off the ground the first time required the stars lining up in a particular way that won't happen again. I have to aim lower, just focus on MMA, see how that goes.

Local case numbers are plummeting now, so if that continues, I may go back to the gym early. I'm not sure though, and numbers may shoot back up. Seems dumb to go through all this, only to get covid a few weeks before being fully vaccinated.