That time normality returned—again

One year ago last week—at 11:59pm on Tuesday, November 16, 2021—Hamilton finally joined the rest of New Zealand at Covid Alert Level 2, which meant fairly normal life again. The first thing I did was ring the moving company who shifted me from Auckland to Hamilton in January 2020 to come to my house to collect the last of their boxes (the Facebook “Memory” above is about that). Covid Lockdowns had delayed that several times by then, and I was keen to act quickly in case we ended up back under Lockdown again.

The boxes were collected the following morning, on November 17, and that meant I again had some space to move around in the garage, and, I thought, I could resume my project clearing the garage. It didn’t work out that way: I didn’t resume the project because by that time of year, it was already getting too hot in the garage. I also haven’t re-started the project since, apart from some small, isolated tidying here and there, though I suppose the shelves installed put in my laundry area are at least related to the larger project. And, of course, the garage is now starting to get hot in the daytime again.

The truth is, it feels like much more than a year ago, because 2021 felt like it was a few years long: It was a terrible year, the second-worst of my life, actually. That year, I lost first Sunny and then Jake seven months later. Then along came the absolutely brutal Covid Lockdown covering Hamilton and parts of the Waikato for weeks and weeks and weeks. New Year’s Eve last year was among my best ever because I got to shove that f*cking 2021 out the door.

Looking back on it now, I think 2021 just plain wore me out (and, of course, so did 2020 and late 2019…). On top of that was, as still is my belief, medication holding me back. Because of all that, I had several different stretches in which I got little or nothing accomplished for weeks on end. I now see that I was just too exhausted—mentally, physically, emotionally, existentially, all of that, and every other kind of tired I didn’t think of to include in that list.

However, things improved this year, beginning in the second half of the year, especially in late August. The improvement’s still not quite as much as I’d have hoped, but it IS improvement. Besides, this is a long, arduous journey, not a race, and certainly not a sprint. If it’s not going as fast as I’d like, it’s still progress—I’m doing “what I can, when I can”, and that’s all that matters to me.

However, it’s also true that I still have a long way to go to finish this transition toward whatever my life will become. The progress I’m making is important, not merely because I’m getting stuff done, nice though that is, but because it’s evidence that I’m beginning to recover from the better part of three years of hell. “Beginning” is the important word there.

One year ago last week, normality returned—again. The months that followed were a time of recovery for me, and now I’m again beginning, slowly, to move forward. And that’s definitely something good that’s happened in 2022. It’s a nice change.