Week seventeen, then week eighteen. The end of the isolation chapter, and something that shifted in me during the hardest part of it. I’m still not ready to say everything that happened in those weeks. But I can say something.
The three weeks leading up to this point were the hardest of my life. Mentally and emotionally, more exhausting than anything I’d been through before. I wrote at the time that I wasn’t at the stage where I could really talk about it, even in a private diary. That’s still mostly true.
What I can talk about is what I found in myself. Which surprised me.
I’ve always had a vindictive streak. When things aren’t going my way, I can argue around most objections. I used to think of it as a skill. The truth is it’s often been a hindrance. Pair that with a need to be right, to be seen to be right… and you’ve got a character that, when hurt, can do real damage.
So. Hurt, pain, betrayal, and all of that sitting in the mix together. It could have been combustive.
It wasn’t.
Instead I found a strange rational calm. A focus on putting things right rather than winning. There were days of real sadness, yes. But they were outweighed by a recapturing of lightness in the house that I hadn’t expected to find.
I don’t think that came from me. Not the version of me I’d been for most of my adult life. It came from a long path of changing the bits about myself I’d never been happy with. Moving my focus from my own needs to the people I care about. Getting closer to the one who, looking back, has always been there.
2020 was supposed to be the year I completed the first part of that journey. I hadn’t expected so much to be thrown at it.
Yet there I was. Still standing.
A week later, life started returning to normal. Queues of traffic at the Brynglas tunnels. Tesco had dropped the one-way system. Pubs opening the following week.
I wrote at the time that I hoped certain parts of the enforced stop would stay. When you suddenly brake like that… you notice things you’d been moving too fast to see. I didn’t want to lose all of that in the rush to get back to where we were.
Some of it has stayed. Some hasn’t. That’s probably honest.
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Peace
G