Sick and Tired

I never realised just how much I live in the past until I tried to practise speaking the languages I have been learning. I have quite a reflective and retrospective personality, which ironically in hindsight now seems obvious. This wasn't really brought to my attention though until I reached the units of the Duolingo Spanish course that deal with the past tense.

The bulk of the course leading up to that point deal with the present tense and to a very limited extent some future tense statements but you generally construct nonsensical statements and learn grammar and syntax organically through a process of osmosis - this is intentional, Duolingo has posted on their blog a few times detailing their ethos and their approach to teaching, the absurdity of the sentences is supposed to make them stand out in your mind, of course the drawback is that they are sentences you're never going to use.

When you finally reach the past tense though you have to learn the difference between fui/era and estuve/estaba which is too complicated to go into in a single post but the abridged explanation is that they are both past tense versions of the verbs Ser and Estar respectively which both mean "To be" - or in this case to have been, or was/were; one deals with passing states and one deals with permanent states.

What really made me come to realise how much I think about my past were the exercises I set myself to write about who I am and to talk about my life, in the process I found myself talking more about who I was, and the life I have lived up until this point. If you have been following this blog for a while you will know right here and now I am going through some ongoing health problems which are still not resolved, the latest minor update is that I am being tested for Coeliac Disease and my newest Doctor took one look at my food diary and said almost immediately that she thinks I have an ulcer and would like to get that checked out. Bottom line is that my present tense is filled with uncertainty so it's probably not surprising that I focus more on the certainty of things that have already happened.

This is ultimately a false sense of security though, I have written previously of the ignorance of youth and how we can grow up experiencing life one way, oblivious to what is happening in the wider world but as we grow older and gain emotional maturity and have adult conversations with your parents and friends you gain a new level of context and awareness which can fundamentally shift your perception of what you once experienced.

I like to call this shift between past experience and past reframed the Santa Claus paradox, because on the one hand the magic of Christmas is something I miss, that naivety and sense of wonder when you see the whole thing through the eyes of a child - I don't have children but I can imagine for many people the desire to have kids is probably rooted in the desire to relive your childhood vicariously through your own children. On the other hand when you grow up and start to look at Christmas differently, the reality of the consumerism, the panic buying, and the obsession with trying to have the "perfect" Christmas really warps your perception of it, I can entirely understand why so many now are anti-Christmas even if their opposition has nothing to do with the religious elements - in fact I know a fair few religious people who hate what Consumer Christmas™ has done to their tradition.

My personal relationship with Christmas changed after 2016, despite how bad that year was overall, that Christmas was the closest thing to perfect, no arguments, no conflict, food was good, drink was good, everyone was (mostly) healthy and it was comfortable financially. After experiencing that I gave up most of the pressure associated with the holiday, the last few years in particular I have wound down the shopping sprees, I buy one big present for each person usually a fragrance they like because I know they will use it, and one small present that is usually edible in some way like chocolate because it's an experience they can have.

Having an aversion to talking about the present probably isn't healthy, and is probably a sign of a deeper level of unhappiness which to be honest I'm not ready to unpack right now. I am, I feel, is defined by "I am sick, I feel sick" and to quote Anastacia, I am sick and tired of always being sick and tired.