Can I just be me again?
Can I go back to being the me I was before?
We have the builders in the house completing a bathroom renovation that we had started before ‘the virus’.
If it had been a month later we wouldn’t have started but we had and it was paid for and they came back in more than a week ago to finish it off.
The bathroom is in my bedroom and Josh the Plumber and Bill the Joiner and the Plasterers and Ross the boss have been coming and going through my house since a week ago on Monday.
Part of the reason for this is that I’m personally really quite indifferent to COVID-19 and it’s potential impact on me and even on my family.
You might think that’s reckless and you may think that I might pay the price of that going forwards but in the circumstances I’m in at the moment and with the precautions that I take, I think the risks to me and my family are infinitesimally small.
I also believe that I’ve already had it (although my wife disagrees).
So Ross the boss asked me to come up to said bathroom as I was working from home because he was worried that the way the new toilet is seated is slightly off the wall and we might be bothered about the gap.
So, Josh and Ross and I had a hilarious interchange about me not giving a sh*t about gaps or toilets on walls or colours or floors or any of that cr*p and just being spineless and not being able to make a decision because Alison would have other ideas.
As I walked away I realised that for the 5 minute period it was just pure joy and we were laughing and swearing and I was telling Ross that if he called me Mr. Campbell one more time I wouldn’t pay his bill.
I really felt like I was me again.
The trouble is that you then turn your attention back to the work at the kitchen table and the implications of what you’re doing.
Work was never easy or straightforward and life was never easy or straightforward and threw curve balls from now and then and sometimes more often than that.
But now it’s harder because they're everyday and multiple times a day and I refuse, in fact I absolutely cannot, just sit back and let this happen to me and to us, I have to be working forwards.
There's a price to pay for that of course and it changes you a little bit and so I’d like permission to be me again for a while, to go back to the me I remember and the me I was before the me became the me that has to deal with Coronavirus.
There are flashes of course all the time of the me that I want to be but it’s interspersed with a massive emotional effort of navigating through the hyper object.
Blog Post Number - 2377
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