nearly normal

It almost felt normal yesterday.

“It” being everything.

I was climbing my stairs at home (and climbing is accurate – I’m 100% certain their pitch is steeper than is allowed in a new build or remodel these days) and for a moment, I was climbing those stairs in a world that just existed. It wasn’t a world that we were all standing by, expecting to change or shift, those stairs, that climb, they existed in a world that would continue on… day after day.

Okay, so I’m having trouble explaining that. So much of what we’re doing right now is followed by “won’t this be easier when things are back to normal… new normal…whatever”. For some reason, that feeling or thought had completely left me just long enough to be noticed. Why did it hit me when I was climbing the stairs? Who knows?

I’ve been a bit under the weather since the middle of last week and yesterday was that one day you have while you’re sick where you don’t feel off anymore, so you throw caution to the wind and do EVERYTHING you’ve put off for months… but you compact it into a 3 hour period until you’re reminded that you are still under the weather and mistakes have been made. Sometimes that happens right in the middle of vacuuming under the bed, or rearranging the summer clothes to fall clothes or perhaps you’re scrubbing those base boards you haven’t scrubbed since… well… those base boards you haven’t scrubbed… period.

So perhaps that normal feeling was some chemical high my brain was feeling from getting things done.

But like the moments that follow so many high emotions for the past 8 months, I crashed. This morning I woke up feeling under the weather again, the world isn’t normal, and I started the week with my usual big Monday sigh.

You know the one… we all have one.

I’m feeling as though I’m at a fork in the road. I need to figure out what my next step is and commit to it. This time off work has been stressful, yes, discouraging, yup, infuriating, absolutely, BUT it has been nice. There. I said it. NICE. I adored my old job but I didn’t adore the politics that developed in the workplace and I’d often propel myself to the office in the morning wiping tears from my cheeks and giving myself a pep-talk. I was there for my team. I was there for my clients. I was there for the love of events.

I also had a lot working against me while there.

And there you have it. It’s been NICE to not have that weight around me.

But where do I go now? I can’t live in “nice” forever. I have some irons in a few fires that if actualize, would all be great opportunities. However, 2 of them would require moves to new to me communities. On one hand, moving to a new to me community was the best decision my husband and I could have made for our lives as a whole over 7 years ago (there were cons, there are always cons, but overall – the best decision). But this time feels different. Perhaps it’s the weight of things making it hard to see what could lie ahead or perhaps it’s that I wasn’t originally searching for a change like this… not yet anyways.

It’s all so heavy.

On Friday, we had a frustrating outing just looking for some tacos. You know. Like Taco Bell tacos. Nothing fancy. We didn’t want street tacos. We didn’t want GINORMOUS fancy tacos with all the fixings. We just wanted cheap tacos so we could go home, eat bad food, and binge the rest of season two of The Boys. We struck out at the two locations we could have found some and when faced with the other COVID friendly options within a reasonable distance from our house, we threw in the towel and went home to reheat some pizza from earlier in the week.

I went home that night ready to pack up boxes and leave town.

Perhaps that will be all it takes to be ready to leave town for one of the other opportunities I’ve been working on. Failed attempts at finding cheap tacos without having to leave your car. I thought, “well, the Portland area is nice, but wouldn’t it be nice to live somewhere with more generic drive through options?” Go ahead and add that to the list of things I never thought I’d say pre-COVID.

And I’ll leave you with this. While journeying into the backyard to take a peek at our hydrangeas last night, we noticed the rhododendrons putting off some flower buds… they’ve already bloomed this year… this isn’t right. I also spy MANY new leaves on our honeysuckle that had died back a month ago. Nature is up to some weird things late in October… I think I’ll lock the doors.