change
It’s 4.45am, and the coffee machine is brewing. I make myself some toast and sit down at my laptop to read my RSS feeds. For now, that’s my only remaining connection to the internet aside from doing research. I’ve left my beloved Mastodon timeline behind. Even though Mastodon gets a lot right, it’s still a social network with an endless feed that makes me constantly check my phone, and I don’t like that anymore.
My life is changing quite a bit right now. For the past six months, we’ve been living in a small town – or what some might call a village. I go out much less and see far fewer people. At first, I hated it, but I’ve slowly grown accustomed to it.
But something has happened to me. On my little one's birthday—who isn't so little anymore—my self-image suddenly changed during a brief moment of reflection. I no longer see myself as a twenty-something, which I haven't been for a long time. Even in my mind's eye, I'm suddenly old.
Overall, I can live with that, and sometimes I can even enjoy it, but it's different, and I don't like change. Although there is one thing I would like to change: I would like to be as fit as I was in my mid-twenties again. But for that, I would first have to stop smoking. That's long overdue and is having an increasingly negative effect on my body.