Dystopia conclusion!

It has finally happened.
The other day, I have read on the news that the pandemic is no longer a public health emergency. Was that the term? I hope so.
I am not going to discuss whether this is right or wrong, or too early, but since the motivation to start this blog and my witching-writing-journey came from the need to have a Dystopia diary, I feel the need to write about this.

This one moment!

This moment when the news reached me?
It was not a very interesting moment, to be honest.

Of course, it is important to capture moments in which history touched our very normal lives, but that does not mean that each and every one of them is really worth it. A while ago, I read Tori Amos novel (kind of thing…) „Resistance“ and did not really get the point she wrote it for … except to tell us which hotel room she was in when nine-eleven happened, which was something I did not really take anything meaningful from. I still love her music, but the point of the book is still beyond me.

So, this message reached me when I was sitting in the attic with my black cat and was recording something. My cat was not very happy about this and had retreated to the back of the room, still reluctant to leave de spite the noise my violin had made. I was eating chocolate and drinking coffee while listening to one of my poems and some distorted violin over and over again. I was finally recording music again!

All my Dystopia diary poems were a part of it, as well as a good friend with spicy ideas! Yea!

And while I sat there, my phone, my laptop and my violin scattered between music sheets I had handwritten, I realized that I had not ever believed in this day to come.
I mean, I was not stupid. I had always known that the pandemic was going to end some day, and that it was not a government trick to keep us oppressed.
But I had never thought to read a statement one day that things were slowing down.
That things were getting better.
That the emergency was over.

In the second half of 2020, I so often tried to find out when this was most likely going to happen, and I could not really find a response. Especially, before the vaccines were ready, there were only very careful ideas on this, and it was most often talked about years and decades before this virus became controllable.
Adding up to my misery back then, my most important friends are high educated and politically interested people, which is great but often exhausting (just like I am for others as well, I know that!), and they told me often that nothing was ever going to be normal again, because of the all the chronically ill and those that could not get vaccinated, and new versions and so on and on … We have certainly all become more sensible about these things, and I did not see my friends all flu season!

But there, in the attic of an old farm house, with a grumpy black cat on my bed, my creativity at a peak, I read that things were slowly getting better for real now!

But what does that mean?

First of all, it means hope.
Finding hope when reading the news is something we are not used to anymore, so this is huge.
It means that Covid-19 is still a threat, but there was enough reason to lower the alarm.
Things are looking good these days and there is reason to hope it’s gonna stay that way!

Does it make up for all the years that had been lost?
Does that make me forgive and forget how many people I have lost without ever saying Goodbye?
Will I now return to my old way of living and follow up my old goals?
Does this stop the pain?

Of course not.
The prize we had to pay will always be high.
All the moments that were not shared, all the pain that was suffered alone.
All the meaning friendships have lost …
I cannot go back to what I did before.
My goals changed, and that is good.

Dystopia conclusion!

This last point leads to my Dystopia conclusion.
Conclusion? Is Dystopia over?
I will talk about that in a moment!

First my conclusion for now!

Some very important things, I have learned about myself.

I really hated the past three years, but then again I loved so many things about it.
Whenever I talk about lockdown, the first I say is that is was awful each time, and the second one is always something that was inspirational, and the second list grows.
I loved the walks on the fields, the writing time! I loved the daily routine I had to develop all on my own. The cooking for the next three days, because the days were so easy to plan. And of course:

Writing! Writing, writing!

Being locked away alone with myself was tough, because I am tough to take, even for myself. I am intense, extreme, and I have had a rough past, which I sometimes tend to lock away too neatly, to then be surprised by how bad it actually all was, when it finally gets through to me again.
Being me is tough for me.
This made me give up my dreams.
It made me give up on my creativity when I was very young.
I wrote here about all my aborted dreams, and by now I am determined to not do that to myself anymore.

Being alone with myself made me risk it again.
It made me write! It made me remember how badly I had wanted to be a writer when I was younger.
It also made me sing, and play my violin again.

But that is not all.

It also made me buy scented candles, and pick the right music to play loud without headphones for tasks such as doing the dishes and cooking. It made me figure out what kind of oatmeal I need, and how I like my coffee best. It made me paint the walls in my room in mint green and violet and spray paint my furniture in black. It made me dry roses and put them on the wall as a reminder of summer.

I learned to live with myself and respect myself in a way I had never done before.

Was this worth all the tragic in the past three years?
Do we need the pain of Dystopia to become better people?
Hopefully not, although I needed this interaction with myself badly.
…and things in life aren‘t just black and white. You can‘t always weigh them against each other.

So, what now?
Is Dystopia over?
Oh god, certainly not!
My world is shaken by the genocidal war in Ukraine everyday, as is for most people close to me.
My exhausting, well-educated and politically very active friends are preparing for the complete collapse of our economic and ecological system, and I have to admit that we have to brace ourselves.

The next decades are going to be tough.
I cannot predict in which way exactly, but we will see more and more places of the earth become uninhabitable, more unstable governments due these crisis in resources and more people fleeing into places where they meet discrimination and racism, in parts born out of the great insecurities and hopelessness these scenarios hold for everyone involved.

The only thing we can do is face it and make the best of it.
Be better than Dystopia.

And for me, I‘ll write about it as long as I can.
Always be the writing witch, giggling and observing herself through Dystopia.
Hopefully looking cute, and finding sources of coffee.
That’s it for me. I’m not done yet.