Time isn't real, but you are

Time isn’t real. It’s like my own personal existential crisis laced mantra but recently it’s begun to feel painfully true. You’d think I’d be used to that feeling by now; after all, mine (and maybe your) sense of time and space has been warped beyond comprehension since March 2020. And yet, the fact I was in a hotel bar just a few days ago clinking in yet another new year still managed to jut me in the ribs as a champagne flavoured shock. 

Why? I can never quite put my finger on it. It’s not as if the past 365 days have flitted by without memory or meaning. So much has happened and yet I’m pulled in by the same kind of sadness

I feel on my birthday; it’s warm, hopeful, it’s nostalgic and bittersweet. The overwhelming tidal wave

of another year gone by quickly replaced by another as if it had been there all along. A relentlessness that’s both full of what could have been but also of promise. *Sigh*

It’s supposed to be a shining symbolic beacon, newness and reinvention. Thankfully, most of the ‘new year, new me’ rhetoric has fizzled out, but the remnants still very much linger in various shapes or forms, which isn’t in of itself a bad thing. My skepticism towards this drive for change has similarly waned over the years, but I’m still a stickler for needing the reason behind it. In other words, not changing because we’ve completed another trip around the sun, but because we want to. 

And what about the changes we’ve collected without even realising it? The ones we didn’t need diet plans or resolutions for. While the places we find ourselves in on 1 January may feel painfully the same, we are not. We’ve been heartbroken, we’ve been head over heels, we’ve discovered parts of ourselves we’re trying to understand and come to terms with. Even if time isn’t real, the way we have become different people - not better or worse - is a poignant reminder that we very much are. 

Happy 2023, I hope you’re keeping well and staying safe - I promise my next post will be more upbeat, maybe.

Photos by the incredible PortraitsByRita 

xxx