What when the pandemic ends?

 Oh shit.

The pandemic is going to end sooner or later at this rate, and I'm not prepared for this. I'm not prepared with my life, in terms of getting it in order, not prepared in terms of long-term planning towards where I want to be in the medium to long term and how I want to get there. Most definitely not prepared in if and when and whom I want to be with, people-wise. Or where I want to be, the city or the suburb, or the country life, east coast or west coast, or somewhere just out in the wild.

I'm not prepared in terms of closing out my hobbies and catching up new ones. Not prepared with my creative outputs, organizing them, and planning to produce something for common public consumption. Most definitely not prepared...and this is a big one, which will come fast and swift and it's going to be a little shocking and surprising every time it happens but of course there's only one way to go... for my close or not so close friends and acquaintances and well-wishers to get married or make long term partnership decisions, and move to boring places and have babies and plan for the next twenty years. I'm not prepared for what lies ahead.

The pandemic came at a point when I was in a middle of a pretty big transition, I said in late 2019 that 2020 would be MY year, a year of change and growth, a year where I take myself where I need to be, take destiny in my hands finally. And I did...for the first two months or so until everything happened and I went back into my cocoon so very afraid, unprepared to just take in the background pressure of life in addition to the overwhelming stresses of the pandemic. As the obvious stress of the pandemic became more normalized, the other issues sort of faded away, lets wait for the pandemic to end, I thought, lets wait this out, who knows how long it will last and it'll be a stupid idea to make solid decisions while this is still with us.

Well now it's looking like things are going to be normal, more or less, in the next half year. There will be safety considerations obviously, but we won't have to put our lives to pause. In fact, a lot of lives might experience a 'speedrun', because people are so freaked out by the unpredictability of the universe and human existence, they will try to 'counterbalance' it with stable reasonable institutions like marriage, having babies, and doing stable boring things, think about the long term. Even if they would otherwise not be working towards that. Which sucks because I'll be reducing my age by a year at least, and they'll have gone through more than one year of psychological age in the same period, so my compadres of the same age will be ahead of me by at least two years. Minimum. More in terms of what they will have achieved and how they will have positioned themselves.

I'm woefully, scarily, disappointingly under-prepared. If life is a battle, I'm shaving my eyebrows to get rid of the unibrow while the rest of my platoon is sharpening their arrows, ready to charge at the enemy. And I'm not ready to put on my armor because...that's not where I want to be. Right now. And also the armors have all been taken up and the one armor that I do think is cute is kinda' thinking of going somewhere and also it's unclear what's happening, nobody knows, I'm not freaking out yet. But I might be freaking out over the next one year, so be warned.

Lets hope this doesn't crash and burn.