Among the other things that I miss because of all this mess this year, or as Dutch call it ‘coronacrisis’, are the two trips I planned to do this spring: to see early spring in Ukraine and to enjoy the summer forests of Latvia. There was an amazing car trip around Riga and suburbs last year, and while it was not my first time there, I was there alone. Alone inside the beautiful nature of Latvia.
I have friends, not many, and some of them are already in a better world now. Which means that I cannot loose them. They are always in my heart in a kind of a stable state.
But I’ve mentioned ‘alone’ in the last passage because of the story I was playing the central role in last year. The story in which—one by one—I was loosing people that I trusted to.
It all started with a slogan I posted on Twitter and got an immediate blast of Americans who found it pro-Trump. It followed by me being charged of the fact that I did not want to accept that somebody can hurt somebody by calling their pre-transgender name. Which was completely fine for the person, but totally wild for the masses, who targeted me hardly.
It continued by face-to-face acquisition of being not LGBTQ-tolerant (me? not tolerant? really?) and loosing another couple of people I had really friendly relations for a few years.
Enough? No. I was organising the conference, and I was loosing the attendees and the key speakers because of the above. I can play a role, but I can’t pretend that I accept the things I do not accept. Who cares if you are personally totally responsible for an event with a €100K+ budget, with both financial and reputation sides, not to mention the good thing I was doing for a vanishing community. Who cares if you can find dozens of reasons to blame a person because of your own internal problems and fears?
For one of the invited guests, we ordered a rental car so that they could enjoy Latvia‘s beauty. That did not happen.
The worldwide-brand hotel screwed our contract and booked 150% of their capacity, cancelling our reservations. I had to handle all that having all those community problems on top of it.
Funny enough, this year’s conference was supposed to happen in Amsterdam, where I live, but which I would not have attended. The voting between our proposal to host a conference on Cyprus and the other proposal to make it in Amsterdam ended up with a small advantage of the latter.
Imagine me, who was standing at the stage looking at the voting process. People in the queue were putting glass pills to one of the two baskets, and with some pills put into the wrong box I saw how another person demonstrated their double-face, cancelling their own promises they did earlier the same day. Thew new drop — the new loss.
It was difficult.
I am strong enough to handle that. Yes, almost a year have passed, and I am writing this at 3 o’clock in the night. I still have this in me even if I am pretending this is all over. I hope it will slowly go. But I lost a number of people whom I thought as of trustful and pleasant. I will never be able to restore that loss.
On the other side, it is great that a couple of my true friends helped me to overcome all this turbulence. Should I call strong myself because of them? I don’t know. Probably, yes. Thank you guys, you know who you are.
The people l’ve lost, you also know who you are. I tried to reset the relation, you did not want. Well, I do not insist. I did what I had to even if I did not believe it would work.
All in all, it was extremely difficult time for me last year in August. I was enjoying Latvia’s nature alone, and that was just fantastic.
What is the moral of the fable? It’s very simple. The coronavirus pandemic cancelled all plans this year. Including the conference that was not supposed to be organised by me. I saved a lot of efforts and didn’t have any risks involving with cancelling flights, hotels, catering, and speaker agreements.
The new conference is planned to be hosted—how they call it—‘in the cloud.’ The organiser that won kind of disappeared, giving very few public information about what’s going on. Since the very first day when the virus was here in Europe, not a tiny piece of information.
To some extent, I was happy that we were not chosen. I did not want to deal with people who could so easily change their mind and find devil motives in things they were even not involved in directly. I honestly wished the new organiser all the best, but the Universe decided to change plans.
So, the moral is here. It does not matter how hard it is for you to handle the world, the world is smart enough to give you only the best. Just go forward.
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