As it is clear from my last several posts, I am on my way to “back to normal.” However, something has permanently changed; in some sense, it is a “new normal,” and I am trying to figure out how the past several months have changed me.
One thing is that I feel removed from “ordinary human feelings,” and I am unsure whether this is here to stay with me. Since October last year, I have been so focused on Prairie Postgres that everything else has become non-essential. I blame myself for not contributing to election campaign, not doing canvassing, not talking enough about the issues. I was among many who didn’t do enough. I definitely didn’t have “cycles” for that, but still.
My decision matrix, my Eisenhower quadrants, were skewed to the sole purpose of making sure the Chicago conference happens, and the Chicago community is not negatively affected. I consistently find myself at a loss responding to “how are things with you, what’s new in your life?” I mean people, who might not be my closest friends, but who know me well enough or care enough so that I can’t reply: “All good, thank you for asking.” Still, I understand that it would be the weirdest thing to start answering such questions with what is really on my mind. Because the honest answer would be something like that: “For several months, some people were trying to make my life incredibly difficult to the point I was afraid to check my email, and they were trying to stop me from doing things which were important to me and to my community. There were many times when I wanted to quit and walk out, but I did not give up, and now everything is good, and nobody is after me.” And that’s the first, second and third most important thing in my life.
I know that I didn’t talk enough with many people who care about me, and I care about them. There were several months of ignoring emails, skipping events, and telling myself that I will have time for all of that later. I can only imagine how many of my friends, especially my “remote” friends think that I forgot about them, or that their lives are not interesting to me anymore.
Looking back at the past several months, I do not know how I did it :). When i was at the PGConf.dev, and when I attended multiple meetups last week, many of those to whom I told about my not-for-profits reacted: oh, you got 501(c)?! Congratulations! Or asked me: is it your full time job? So, I guess, I did something good, and something to be proud of.
Still, I want to get back to “being human,” but Prairie Postgres would still remain not “one of the things” I am doing, but “the most important thing” I am going, and hopefully the thing that outlive me :).
Hettie's Reflections 