I am not a clumsy person. I am NOT. I swear. Well…maybe occasionally. Don’t believe every word you hear, but I have been known to put both contact lenses on the same eye. And drop a couch on my bare foot. And cut off my cat’s whiskers.
There HAVE been moments. Yes. But the latest one is a doozy. I moved house this week. The owner provided the washing machine, which was gracefully (so they say) hoisted up 4 flights of stairs by my partner and his brother. Eager to try it out, I stuff a bunch of clothes in. Turn it on. Midway through the wash I notice it is jumping around a bit more than normal. I ignore it. Cycle finishes, I open the door. Our clothes are covered in an enormous pile of wet white fluff. A ridiculous amount. Apparently the owner left the instruction manual inside. All 90 pages of it. A Bible of sorts written in 12 languages.
Pulverised. The manual is gone but not completely as it is now forever embedded in a good chunk of my clothes. Beats the occasional misplaced tissue, eh?
Don’t think I don’t see you chuckling over there behind the screen. Laughing at my manual-mishap. Go ahead, get that chuckle out of your system, I had a good one myself.
But let me tell you, there’s more to this than just a moment of clumsiness. This was the pinnacle of a self-induced frenzy. A culmination of 2,5 months of doing, doing, doing with occasional pit stops for being. The Covid-19 outbreak had an effect on me like the spurs of a cowboy on the side of a horse. (Yes, I am well aware that I am making up my own analogy and placing myself as the horse, take that chuckle elsewhere. Nobilo-kobilo, Croatians will get the pun.) It kicked me into full gear and I sped off. I wish it was off into the sunset, but instead it was off onto the DIY film set. I set up my own home Yoga studio from which I streamed classes, successfully keeping my head above water as all professional face-to-face activities in the non-Zoom world ground to a halt.
If this analogical horse of mine was pimped up to reflect the speed at which I was moving, it would have had aerodynamic hoofs and a spoiler above the tail. I was off and away. The braking system was faulty, though. I would occasionally wish to slow down, but there was no horse rider to pull on the reins. I still felt the pain of the spurs hurrying me along, though the pressure to perform was long gone. I kept going. Rest was merely an afterthought.
And in the midst of this professional feeding frenzy, I fell in love. Like, for realz. Covid was my Cupid and it brought me the most wonderful of moments while the craziness of Corona continued. Somehow, unbeknownst to the outside world, we created our own world together. A basis for life. And it led to a decision to move back to Luxembourg.
Marvellous as this decision was, and as smoothly as the move itself went, I brought to it the same taste of manic doing as I did to my work life. I packed way more diligently than I needed to. I cleaned my old apartment to the brink of OCD. I did all the motions perfectly at the right time. Success. Or so I naively thought. “Yes…(pulls back fist in a gesture of satisfaction), if I do all the trivial daily tasks perfectly, I will fool myself into thinking that I have things under control.”
***As I write this I take a break to have a video call with my partner. I catch myself talking to him on my phone and at the same time cleaning the dust from my laptop screen with my FOOT. My foot, people. That’s my level of multi-tasking. I laugh at my utter craziness and the irony of doing that in my break in writing about that same craziness. It’s mostly me laughing, he looks slightly worried.***
Yadda, yadda, yadda, long story short – it’s high time I slowed the f**k down. All it took was a disintegrated washing machine manual, a friend telling me “who needs a paper shredder when Maša can do your laundry for you”, and belly laughs at, about and with myself to get me to realise this. Not a high price to pay, I’d say.
And as for the title of this blog – honestly, it’s recycled. It’s an alliteration that I have been keeping in my back pocket, originally meant to be used as a title for a blog post reflecting on past relationships. Instead, I found it fitting for this post only because of the “rinse & repeat” bit in relation to my machine-washing skillzzz. Consider it my first active step towards embracing imperfection.
Hands up, who else needs to chill their booty? Hit me up with your thoughts, I know you’re out there, overachievers!
