Week 5 ~ Looking for the silver linings
Tempers have frayed a few times at home this week.
My youngest who is living with us at the moment is finding it tough going in particular. He is working from home, so is lucky to still be employed but it’s not a job he enjoys at the best of times. Of course when you work at a job you don’t particularly like, you live for those things outside of work - spending time with friends and family, holidays and in his case also playing football. All of those things are now unavailable to him. He has however bought himself a bike this week and has been going out on it every day when he finishes work, which has given him something else to think about, and is helping him get his knee back to full strength.
He has rather been landed with us living with him a lot sooner than planned too, we weren’t planning on moving up here until at least June and he had been tentatively thinking about getting his own place. So I guess the silver lining for him is, while putting up with us, he is also managing to save lots more money than he would have normally!
I’m still vaguely avoiding Twitter, especially around the time of the daily briefing, but what I have noticed this week is people becoming more judgemental. I’m reminded of being at school when someone would try and get someone else in trouble with the teacher, who would reply “never mind what they’re doing, just concentrate on what you’re doing”. A few weeks ago everyone was shouting “be kind”; how quickly people have reverted to type, jumping to conclusions about their neighbours. It’s amazing how many perfect people there are in the world. The press are making things infinitely worse, showing doctored photos designed to suit their stories about how people aren’t social distancing meanwhile asking the government to talk about how we will come out of lockdown and when. There’s not much you can ultimately do to influence other people’s behaviour, so I will just carry on following the rules myself and let others get on with it. I’m pretty sure the government will tell us when they’re ready and we have still had it a lot easier in this country than others, Spain and Italy especially.
It’s difficult to find things to keep us going in these times, but the people joining in with my hashtag #101thingsthatmakemesmile on Instagram this week are finding lots of things to make them smile. Nature is bursting out all over as evidenced by the many photos of bluebells, wisteria and lilacs. Getting the tag started again after losing my original Instagram account to hackers a couple of weeks ago has really helped me feel a bit more optimistic. Two ladies have been singularly outstanding in trying to help me with that but unfortunately they ended up coming up against the same brick walls as me, so I think I’ve just accepted now that sadly I will never get my Facebook or Instagram accounts back.
Does it really matter? Not in the grand scheme of things no, but it was something that I’d built up with time and effort, like a garden, only for it to all be snatched away through no fault of my own. I was part of the Sheclicks community on Facebook and had joined that at a time last year where I was really struggling. Now that community is lost to me because I refuse to rejoin Facebook. I’ve also realised how insidious Facebook is. How many times have you joined something and “signed up with Facebook” because it’s the easy option? When I went to use my Spotify account last week I couldn’t work out why my name and photo had been replace by an ID number, then I remembered that it was linked to my FB account. In the end I deleted that account completely and set up a whole new one. I urge you to never join anything via Facebook, always have a different log in and password, because once your account is gone, it make things very complicated. The silver lining is that I no longer get wound up by fools on Facebook… (I know, it’s a very small silver lining this one).
Have I got used to lockdown? Yes, in a way. It’s amazing what you can get used to if you have to but I can't say I'm enjoying it, even with all the things I"m finding time to do. Will it change me? I don’t think I’ll ever be a “fly by the seat of my pants” kind of girl, but I might be slightly more open to “winging stuff” in the future. I can’t guarantee I won’t have a tick list of everything I still want to do when this is all over…
