Hope springs eternal

“Hope and fear cannot occupy the same space. Invite one to stay.”
~ Maya Angelou

Where to start…

Fears I guess as that hopefully means I can finish on the positive

I find my fears to be a constant battle at the moment. My life has changed so much in the last year or so. Everything that I thought I had build relationship wise with Michael has gone. We continue to work on being friends but there are still a lot of emotions surrounding it all for both of us and some days I still grieve for it. Not because I want to go back. I don’t. But because I think I am trapped into between two places. It is almost impossible to move on when you are living together and unable to really leave the house. The life I want, the person I want, is not even remotely available to me at the moment. Some days it feels like this is it, I fear I will be stuck here like this forever with no one to touch me and no one for me to touch. That my days will just roll on one after the after just muddling through, existing rather than living.

Fear around my own health and safety is also something that I seem to live with on a daily basis. I am a vulnerable person as I don’t have a spleen and I will admit that I am very nervous of catching this virus especially since reading more about how it gets into your blood and potentially causes it to clot. That is something I am prone to anyway. Covid-19 could prove a tough a battle for my body and it is not one I want to really attempt but that does mean that I am effectively trapped here in my home for potentially a very long time. What if there is no vaccine? Again, seems far fetched but well, so many things right now seemed fetched 6 months ago

I could go on… I am worries about both my children and the long term effects of this on their lives, their education, their incomes, their mental health. I am worried about my elderly parents. Can they really stay indoors for a year or more?

Hope…

Hope is a feckless useless bitch. I have wasted too much time hoping ‘things’ would fall into place and I would get to see people again. I waited and put things off and that was a huge mistake. It has taught me that relying too much on hope really gets you no-fucking-where. Sometimes you have to fuck hope and do it anyway.

But right now hope is actually really important to me. Despite all my fears which at times can be very consuming I also have a lot of hope for the future. I know what I want. I know where I want to be. We just have to get through this and work on building that world for us.

I also know that my kids and parents are hugely resilient people and that whilst this is so damn fucking hard for everyone, together we will find our way and be OK. I am hugely privileged to be, whilst not financially rich, financially secure and to have a home that is safe. I know that makes me much more privileged than many other people and I strive not to take that for granted.

The world is opening up around me at the moment. People are shopping again, my daughter is attending some short sessions at school (we are both very apprehensive about this mind you). Apparently we could all go a theme park soon if we wanted to. I won’t be because, well I refer back to the reasons above. The most important thing right now, if I want to live my life in the way I desire and be with the person I love, is to stay alive. However a balance needs to be struck because I also know that I can’t just stay shut up away from people for maybe another year. I might be alive but that is not the same as living and so I need to work out what risks I am prepared to take to quite frankly enable me to get through this time mentally.

I wish I could dispense with the fear as per Maya Angelou’s advice above but I have realised that even though those fears are big and real and scary the more I concentrate on hope and put my mind to planning and building for the future that I want the more I can mitigate those fears. It is not easy mind you, fear is powerful and once it has you in it’s grasp it can be hard to escape from it. I don’t think in my whole life I have struggled with it quite as much as I am doing right now and that is saying something as I spent most of my early and mid teens living in a semi permanent state of fear but I refuse to let it consume me. Every day I fight it off and squash it down and hope that tomorrow will bring if nothing else a little bit more hope that eventually things will truly start to get better… and mean that one day I can dress up in some slutty clothes, call myself Hope and he can pick me up in a bar, take me back to his room and give Hope the fucking she truly deserves.

For now though, hope springs eternal but would be really nice if just now and then she could actually deliver rather than mostly being really fucking disappointing.