Remember Real Life?

Zara blazer (similar)
Oak + Fort top (c/o) (similar)
Mavi jeans (c/o)
Mango flats
Anthropologie beret
Zara belt (similar)
Stella & Dot ring
Location: Osborne Village – Winnipeg, Manitoba

…well, do you remember it?

I don’t mean the real life of a year ago, I mean life before everything was digital. Life when some of us bought apartments with green accent walls and didn’t rush to repaint them because it didn’t really matter, we wouldn’t be taking a lot of pictures in that room. Life when people still talked on the phone because texting, if it was an option, required you to press keys on your phone three times just to get one letter. Do you remember that life?

It wasn’t so long ago, really. It surprises me now, when someone other than my mom phones me out of the blue, but that was normal just ten years ago. Ten years ago that we bought our first apartment and thought nothing of the blue paint in the bathroom, the green in the living room. We could fix that all eventually, but it wasn’t urgent, we didn’t need our space to double as a photo studio. Back then, I still wrote occasional letters to friends far away – a habit that I admit I was glad to give up. I wasn’t a great letter writer, prefering the act of receiving correspodance to the act of sending it.

The idea of finding time to write a letter now, by hand, seems almost laughable. Every moment of my existence now is accounted for in a way that I never could have imagined ten years ago.

Do you remember waiting? I do. We waited for everything. And no one was obligated to give you a clear timeline for when they might deliver a service. In my professional life over the past decade, the amount of emails I receive has more than quintupled… and now, every single one comes with a mandatory deadline attached to it. Every person who contacts me is entitled to a response with twenty-four hours. Usually they get it much sooner, but that isn’t really the point. The point is the obligation, which breeds resentment, and the fact that no one seems to recall that anticipation was half the fun of life not so long ago.

It would have been even harder to live through this past year if it were 2010, not 2020. I can imagine enormous long distance phone bills and even more businesses shuttered because of the challenges of setting up work from home. But even though I know that, I admit that I miss answering the question, “How are you?” with adjectives other than busy. I remember a time when I felt fine, sometimes even good, and those were natural responses to give to anyone who asked. The life I remember wasn’t better or worse, it was different. But it was definitely less frantic. And as I struggle, almost constantly, to feel like I’m doing and giving enough, I can’t help but reminisce fondly about a time when life moved more slowly and everyone’s expectations of us, even our own, were lower.

Maybe what I remember isn’t the way it actually was. Or maybe I remember right, but I’m selectively forgetting the parts of that life I hated. Like boredom. And TV commercials. What I do know is that it changed so quickly that it was gone almost before I realised it. As time goes on, it gets harder to explain the way it was to people who didn’t live through it. It starts to feel like it wasn’t real, especially as our social isolation goes on; it starts to feel like we’ve always lived our lives and seen the people we love through screens. But I remember. I remember how it was, and how it changed… and I realise how easily it could all change again.

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