Glitter, gold, and glamour everywhere. Smiles, people packed into a million layers of clothing wherever you look. Besides commercial music, you hear the beeping sound of paying debit cards, on their road into the overdraft. Food everywhere. The media landscape is packed with emotional manipulative advertisements, trying to make us crave things we do not need. Festive outfits, a million for each occasion. And all that fuss just for someone’s birthday who already died. The festive season, for some of us joy, for others the road to depression.
Welcome to January, everyone’s least favorite month, as it is the slight reminder, emotionally and financially that the festive fun is now over. The decorations get taken down, the overdrafts need to be paid back and the festive weight needs to go as well.
I could rant on about how much of a social construct Christmas is nowadays, but there is no point, it won’t change anything.
Welcome to January also means welcome to the blues. Feeling blue. Overwhelmed for what is to come in the following twelve months of the typical year rota, feeling tired from festivities and guilty for not making any new year’s resolutions. Everyone keeps complaining about their pointlessness. For the past 21 years of my life, I have been feeling quite lucky as I never felt the January blues. The January blues felt like a phenomenon to me, an emotion that seemed to catch everyone at some point apart from me.
But this year, it hit me hard.
It might be common knowledge now, at least for people following my social media, that I have moved back again. My time in North America came to an end, the jetlag and the general tiredness kicked in. Having lived in a city with an extreme working pressure for the past couple of months, burned me out. I can’t picture a day I was living in Toronto, having a lie-in or whatever, work became my purpose in life. Coming back to my old life, I needed to take a break from it all, including the internet. It was all too much at once for me. Now, being back for one and a half months now, talking about it feels weird. It feels like I have lived in another world, which I probably have to a certain extent.
It feels like a very intimate time of self-discovery, reflection, and growth and believe me, it is hard to put that into words. One of the most important things this place has taught me is that until you don’t go through something by yourself, you cannot really understand it. Stimulation is not feeling.
Stimulation will only bring you a taste of what things could be, leaving out the ugly parts of the big picture. Toronto was very different from what I imagined it to be. People imagine things different than they are.
Imagination has the great power to take over us, telling us things that aren’t real in the end. My experience was subjective in the end, and I can’t take anyone out of their vision, their imagination of a certain place. That’s what makes it hard to tell people the truth about the experience. The stimulation in our minds overweighs the truth and makes us reject reality. Escapism is a well-practiced activity for everyone.
I know that this text might feel like gigantic chaos in my mind, and to be honest that is the truth.
But we all know, even the most ginormous chaos will make sense at some point. Life will untwist all its confusing plot twists. Everything will fall back into its constellation. Let it happen.
Nina x