A recollection of growing-up memories of a 20-year-old girl in Greece
by Maria Pileidou
Looking back to the years of my childhood and adolescence, only one word could describe this age, uncertainty. Growing up in Greece in the 2010s, I learned to be patient and impatient at the same time. We had it all and nothing at once. And this was our reality, our everyday life was based on a paper tower, always one step away from collision. The content that will follow is based solely on recollections and the original memories I have of that time.
I always had a good memory. One of the strongest recollections I have is the election day of 2015. These are the first elections I remember vividly, with all of their glory and chaos. I can go back to the moment my mom pulled me inside the paravane with her, and I was too short to even reach the standing desk with all the “important” papers. But the 2015 election day was full of agony. Agony that was not so understandable by a 10-year-old. But as every other day, the afternoon came, my parents finally came home, and then it was time for our daily playground time. So, we all walked to the park, and finally, there was peace. This was the sun before the storm.
During the next 3 years, a series of unfortunate events took place. Salary cuts, tax increases, and capital controls. No one was explaining to us, the kids, what had changed, but anyone could feel it, even in the air that nothing was the same. The faces of our parents had changed. Their eyes were filled with worry, and their movements shouted anxiety. I remember my mom bringing home every week from the supermarket canned food of all kinds. Queues were made outside closed banks, while people woke up before dawn to find an ATM to get their daily 60 Euros allowance, before the machines ran out of cash.
Day after day, our reality kept getting worse, until one day it didn’t. And suddenly we were out of all this quicksand, or we wanted to believe we were. There was a time we believed we went back to normal, back to what life should feel like.
It was March and a Wednesday afternoon when the news came out. Schools are closing for two weeks. It was afternoon and I was at my English school. The lesson went on as normal, but the ending was a bit off this time. We said goodbye but not see you again next week. That week turned out to be full of changes and disappointments. Two weeks later the lockdown got postponed, and it kept getting postponed, two weeks at a time for the next two years.
Looking back, that half week until that Wednesday was the last time things were normal. Words like “Normality” sprang out of nowhere. And “pandemic” was not just something we learnt in biology class, now it had a meaning, a feeling, a smell ( a smell of home baked bread and of harsh antibacterial soap). It was for sure a unique era, a time of exploration both of the environment around us and of ourselves. Because all we had at the time was time.
School started again next autumn, but we didn’t spend more than a month in school classrooms throughout the year. The change was abrupt. From chilling around all day at home, we were forced to wake up before 8, be in class, study for school, take extracurricular lessons, and do such without leaving the house. But time passed, everything was over and we continued life, as if nothing had occured.
I was lucky. For me, all these were just events that I can look back on, and for that I am thankful. However, having such vivid memories is both a blessing and a curse. A blessing for my paintings and for the stories and poems that I write, but a curse for my peace of mind. Now, almost 10 years later from that peaceful Sunday evening at the playground, I still fear running out of time to live before the next tragedy hits.
All these experiences shaped us, made us angry at the world, but also filled us with lust for life. And while chaos is what we were taught as reality, the dream of a utopic normality, like the one we were promised, is still present.
Being raised in chaos means learning to embrace it and making it a safe space. It means making your own rules to survive in a world that appears foreign, where you are constantly reminded you are a guest. So, while everyone else dreams about this normality, let us just live, even inside the chaos, without the pressure of being in a waiting line, queueing for a normal life.
