2022?

been musing a little depressively over on twitter about how 2022 was supposed to the be year I got to go out and do things and expand my life and all that and now with Omicron it all seems a bit too hard and crap and like opportunities are already slipping out of my fingers.

There’s threads asking about how your health care has been impacted by covid if you have a chronic illness or are disabled. My thoughts on that were around how it feels like pushing myself outside of my little mental health safe zone while the supports to catch me if I stumble or hit crisis mode seems like the wrong thing to do. Selfish and dangerous. One of the things I was going to do this year was see if moderate “social” drinking and I could have a thing again, now that I’ve been building up skills to apply from therapy to use instead of alcohol as a coping / unravelling mechanism. I’d really love to spend my 40th birthday doing wine tasting with my partner and have that day be a happy memory and not a regret or the start of something horrible. I also know that I may not be able to just socially drink, but I want to try it again armed with skills and self-awareness and strategies and supports. yes, it’s a little selfish, but pretty much any goals of mine involve me trying things that are outside my comfort zone, and I don’t wanna rule anything out. You may see me posting about how that all went horribly wrong later this year, but you might not. I wanna try new things, or old things with new ways.

I was lamenting that my therapy might not be as effective as its so far all been via telehealth. Microsoft teams meetings with my therapist, my DBT group, my Antabuse group. I joked in a group late last year that I was really looking forward to going back to face to face groups because my social skills had deteriorated over Covid. Not a joke. I’m out of practice and the anxiety around things I used to do is immense. I can still go about and do things, I’m just incredible fatigued afterwards. Spoon budgeting is critical, but I also wanna work on it. And if I’m going to do a whole module on “interpersonal effectiveness” it’d be good to have people other than my partner and dog to practice on.

My plan to expand my little world by participating in things that interest me. Picking back up a Japanese class may now be reduced back to doing kanji in a workbook from Amazon. The federal election should be a chance to keep involved in Greens events and the like, but I again want things to be back IRL. It’s harder but gooder for me on a personal level.

At the start of December, before the Argyle nightclub became a superspreader event, there was talk from my doctors and therapists that therapy and groups would go back to in-person. This held a lot of promise for me – The DBT sessions would be right in Newcastle, and I could top up my Opal card and catch the train, and buy a coffee, and look at the beach and all the lovely things that come from being forced to leave the house. The mater sessions going back to weekly groups would also increase my social interactions, and I miss the routine of getting the OzHarvest bags from the local charity and loaves of bread to split with my sister, a reason to visit her more often. I was going to go back to “Cupcake Thursday” but perhaps on a Monday, where I’d go to my parents after school and catch up with the niblings. One is starting HS this year, the second youngest into Kinder. It was in my plans and goals, but it’s hard to time and to do when school is on and off, or you’re wary of getting your loved ones sick, or it’s actually against the rules. But the family all had Xmas covid, so it’s not up to me to infect them any more at least.

So, yeah, 2022 is up in the air. Yay :/ I wanted to have more hope that this.