I didn't plan it so that Day 100 would be Special or Important, but Day 100 had its own ideas: yesterday afternoon, my sweetie and I got our second doses of Pfizer (11 weeks to the day after out first). Day 100 was Double Vaxx Day for our house.

We won't be fully vaccinated until the August 9th, but it feels so much closer now, so much more real than it did two days ago. The thing I feel most (beyond the sore arm) is a sense of hope that one day I'll be able to hug all the babies my friends have had in the past 18 months, that one day I'll be able to manage a trans-oceanic flight, that I'll see the sunrise in a city I've only just met.

I sort of get the science. But I don't need to understand it to respect it. I've always loved viruses and plagues as a CONCEPT, but I never imagined I'd live through a global pandemic. I have the utmost respect for all the sciencey people who have worked so hard on every angle of this pandemic, from doctors and nurses to support-workers to virologists to epidemiologists to the people who believed in science enough to let the Covid-19 vaccines be tested on them.  I have done the best I can to stay safe so all their hard work was not in vain.

I'm not sure how long I'll keep masking, but I know for sure that I'm not ready to stop yet. I have far too much to do in the next few years to risk it all by being hasty or reckless. 

If you haven't had a change to get vaccinated, please do so, not just for your sake (though Your Sake is a huge factor!) but for the sake of international travel, professional sports, big concerts, family reunions, weddings, bat mitzvahs and all the big events that go from fun to deadly in a pandemic. 

I hope that one day I can meet all of you in person, that we can take selfies in your hometown, or mine, or at whatever bonkers event we're attending together. And feeling like that's even possible has increased ten-fold with a second 5-second jab in my arm.

Until next time, stay safe, be kind, and most of all,
lovelovelove,
Merise

I had grand plans for this project.

I was going to practice piano leading up to it. I was going to start playing guitar again. I was going to practice Korean and read in French and it was going to be magnificent. I was going to be good at the things I was learning, even as I began. Honestly, I think I wanted to show off a little, not for accolades, but to prove something to myself.

Then reality hit. The reality that we are (still) in the midst of a pandemic, that this summer was going to be as lonely as last year, that I will not be able to travel until it's cold again (if then). In April, just as I began this project, I began to dip a little and everything became ... really tough. Not the kind that should worry anyone, just the slog where it feels like it takes four times the energy it should to accomplish anything. My plans to do bi-weekly updates, to learn how to edit videos, to share all the fun stuff I was doing... crumbled to dust.

I wanted to be good at all these things, to share the joy in them, but my brain is having trouble processing my first language right now -I keep forgetting basic words, even if I can remember their complicated synonyms- so reading in my second and learning yet another language became impossibly difficult, and picking up two instruments felt equally daunting, even if I've played them before.

We cannot say that the pandemic is to blame for hustle culture, but it sure has made the toxic narrative worse. It is one thing to decide to open a small business, to become an entrepreneur, but with people's incomes disappearing the past year, with the lack of government support for those people, there has been so much pressure the past year to monetize hobbies, to turn everything we do into some sort of side hustle. It all stems from an already pervasive pressure to excel all the things we do. The pressure to be good at everything, the narrative that in order for something to be worth your time you must be inherently good at it (and worthy of selling/making money at it) is, for lack of a politer term, total bullshit.

Most times, when you are new to things, you suck at them. I consider it a deep disadvantage in my childhood that I was naturally talented in a few artistic areas because it honestly prevented me from learning early how to get better at things that *didn't* come naturally to me. I would get discouraged, I would get grumpy, I would want to quit, and my parents let me (except piano, ironically, which I hated The Most but was naturally quite good at). I've spent a long time learning to cultivate the persistence I never learned as a small child.

One of the things I have ALWAYS sucked at is dance.

I did a few months of ballet when I was five years old. I have some memories of being told I was "too energetic" and that my mother would be best to put me in karate. (How someone thought martial arts takes LESS patience and ability to be still than ballet is still beyond me, but I digress... it was mostly a matter of the inherent sexism of the time and how people perceived boys of being ALLOWED to be rambunctious.) In the end, I stopped doing ballet, was later enrolled in Highland dance (which I still sort of sucked at), before quitting dancing entirely for a decade.

In my teens, a classmate convinced me to come out swing dancing one Friday. I have been swing dancing with various degrees of ability ever since. You'd think after so many years, I'd be good. I'm not.

A lot of people in the community ask how long you've been dancing. It's meant to be a safe question but it can be really judgemental too. I hate that question because if I say "since the 90s" they expect me to be AMAZING. I am not. This is not false modesty. I am mediocre, decent on a good day, creative with the right partner. But I'm not a great dancer. I never was and there's a huge chance I never will be.

This is the kicker: I love it anyways. Swing dancing was perhaps the first time where I wasn't self-conscious about being bad at dancing because I wasn't there to be good at it. As a teenager, we went for fun, to go somewhere with music, to be silly, that didn't require spending money on alcohol. Even when we could legally drink, we still went swing dancing instead of to clubs.

In my twenties, I moved and stopped going out dancing, not because I didn't like it but because that group of friends had dispersed to four provinces and three countries to attend university. I missed it. 

In my late teens I signed myself up for ballet classes. I still sucked, but I really did love it. I loved the challenge of it, the forced patience, the quiet. Things I am not naturally good at. But I moved again and again and never really found a way to stick with it.

A few years ago, shortly after I was diagnosed with bipolar, I had a bit of an existential crisis. Which makes sense when someone tells you that an imbalance in you has been causing perhaps 70% of your behaviour for a decade and a half.

I ended up making a list of all the things I loved about myself, all my personality traits, all of my interests and hobbies and passions, to see how many could truly be chocked up to a psychiatric disorder. (None of them that matter most, it turns out.) On this path of self-discovery I also ended up making a list of every activity, hobby, sport, creative outlet I have ever loved and divided them into categories: which ones had been easy for me and which ones had been challenging. What I discovered is that all the things I love most, all the things I keep coming back to are the ones I find most challenging.

Someone had convinced me years ago that I only loved the things I loved because I was naturally good at them and, because there were a number of things I was quite good at that I did love (sewing and pattern drafting, writing, harp) I took this as fact.  But I was NOT a naturally good rower, I have always struggled to find the rhythm naturally talented dancers find innately, and I outright LOATHED playing piano as a child, despite being good at it.
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I sing a lot to myself, despite wrecking an otherwise good voice as a kid when I could not stop singing through half a dozen throat infections. I go for long walks because my knees refuse to let me run. I am a mediocre gardener who can grow good orchids mostly because I forget about them just enough to let them thrive. I do these things because I cannot help myself, because they bring me joy.

I do difficult things that bring me joy too, because the bottom line is that last part: it's not so much about ever mastering a thing, sometimes that old saying that it's about the journey not the destination rings true. Sometimes you do a hard thing because you love it even when you suck at it.