Life has felt really alien lately; I’ve been working from home for 5 months, and my good old normal 9 to 5 routine seems light years away…
What started like a pretty cool adventure – no more school run, and working in my PJs? Bliss! – has slowly lost a lot of its appeal.
IT glitches paired with an overwhelming amount of emails make working conditions literally nightmarish. For some of us juggling home-schooling and working from home until recently, this situation felt like a double sentence: no, home is not your safe haven anymore, and no, you can’t relax between two zoom meetings, because little man needs help with these unidentifiable geometric shapes!
Trips to the shops have become more of a relaxed affair nowadays albeit the mandatory masks in the UK, but do you remember what it felt and looked like up to a month ago? The comparison with an astronaut mission wouldn’t be far-fetched; this is when the infamous R rate and anxiety were at their peak, masks, gloves, antibacterial wipes or toilet paper scarce products, selling like gold dust.
5 months on, we’re still on lockdown mode in the UK and virtually all over the globe, each part of the world applying a customized approach based on their local circumstances.
connection
/kəˈnɛkʃ(ə)n/
noun: connection; plural noun: connections; noun: connexion; plural noun: connexions
A relationship in which a person or thing is linked or associated with something else.
Oh, some good has certainly come out of it – for many of us, the lockdown was the opportunity to genuinely slow down. No matter how busy work has been, confinement has given us the license to stop and breathe, rediscover ourselves, be crafty, get closer to our children and partners. Some have even had the luxury to not have to work from home at all, indulging in activities like reading, writing, drawing, painting all day just because they had plenty of spare time on their hands…
Havoc caused by this hurricane-like pandemic has taken its toll on many families though: the economic rut is raging in all parts of the globe (bank fraud is raging too more than ever…); domestic violence has gone up 20% worldwide according to the UN, the latter describing it as a “shadow pandemic” (have you seen the National Domestic Abuse helpline poster “abusers always work from home”? Efficient and chilling.).
And what about most of us piling on pounds like we were on a mission?! I guess we don’t need to worry, Boris is on the case appparently…
All things considered, are you looking forward to your old normal, dealing with unbearable colleagues in the open space wo can’t shut it when you’re trying to focus, awkward water cooler talk, dragging office town halls, stress inducing school runs and road rage, noisy and sweaty pubs’ meetups, countless kids’ birthday parties, crammed underground trains, air pollution and all that jazz??
The answer is YES for me.
Social connection, as messy as it can be, lends our old normal its humanness; I want it back.
THE OBSERVANT CHICK 
What you described in your last paragraph? No I don’t want it back. But I do admit that hugs from friends and family are missed. It’s like I’m more in charge of my life than before and yes I prefer it that way.
And I thought I was the only one thinking the same about trips to shops but yes, that’s the best for me. I spend less but I just like to look at all those products that today I perfectly know, I don’t need.
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