Things are happening!

My dear cats this is weird. After 14 months of nothingness, hardly meeting anybody and reading all the books I will finally get my first covid vaccination this week. I am all torn apart about how to feel about this. A part of me really enjoyed all of the alone time, the not having social obligations, the working from home, the amount of mental rest I have long been looking for but now got finally thrown into my lap. Yes, you guess right, I am an introvert. But another part of me was also angry a lot. Angry, because after years of being ill from undiagnosed celiacs disease I was finally able to live more. To meet up with my friends and not zone out with massive brain fog, not having to go to sleep at an impossible early hour of the day, but to finally, truly participate. And then covid hit us and that all went down the drain…

Just like many other people I have been seriously ill early March 2020, a flu-like illness, including a high fever and it was also really hard to breath for a while. I couldn’t even walk from my bed to the toilet without having to catch my breath and that’s only a couple of meters… Luckily I have learned all kinds of techniques not to panic when this happens (because I have chronic lung problems), but our doctors didn’t know much about covid yet, and thus I never got tested. By the time I was better, we all went into the first lockdown. So, yeah, I have been taking this covid pandemic VERY seriously from the start. If my illness was not covid-related but another virus, I didn’t want to find out how the real covid virus would hit me.

And so I stayed home. I stayed home and only met up with my partner (when he wasn’t running a cold). During summer we met up with friends, outside, while socially distancing. And it was glorious. We also met up with family a couple of times, but never the entire group. Mostly just my mother-in-law and sometimes (also outside) my sister.

And now this is all going to change in a couple of weeks. And it’s both exciting as a bit scary. Because I do love my alone time. I need it. But I also need my people, I’ve surely learned that during the last 14 months. How can I balance these two things out? I don’t know yet. I know it won’t be as before. And I also know I don’t have to know and figure this thing out on my own. So many people feel like this, so we can all learn together. Besides, it isn’t till late June that I will be fully protected from these vaccines. And most of my friends won’t even receive their first shot till June, which means I have some more adjustment time to prepare myself for getting out into the world again. Maybe I finally dare to get that haircut!