Quarantine Diary 2.0

So this is a follow-up to my last blog, which one might consider to be objectively positive, hopeful, optimistic, the-world-can-still-be-bright-and-shiny-if-you-squint-hard-enough and any other adjective that implies surveying this strange coronavirus-stricken world in rose-colored glasses.

I’m not here to necessarily shit on everything I said in that blog and I actually don’t even disagree with what one-ish-month-ago Tanya was preaching. However, also, fuck the rose-colored glasses.

These words were also written on April 3rd. Today is May 13th. A lot has happened since then, and a lot hasn’t. (Today is actually May 27th—writing this blog 2 weeks ago was one thing, finding an additional spurt of energy to publish it was another.)

So let's talk about what the later half of quarantine has looked like, for me at least.

Some days have honestly been too great: A good night of sleep and freshly brewed coffee in the morning that is the exact right strength with the perfect amount of creamer. Reading in the sun on my porch as the morning turns into midday, and then afternoon. The kind of run where you’re in the zone, you know, when you’re not thinking about how many minutes or miles have gone by, and your favorite songs play at all the right times and you simply feel like you're kicking ass. Pouring a glass of wine in the early evening and listening to Fleetwood Mac with your roommate with the windows open, or whipping up a strong cocktail and turning on a new quarantine-era show (um, Outer Banks anyone???). Sitting outside alone and writing this blog, as the sun goes down and the temperature is so perfect you’re only wearing shorts and a T-shirt even when the sky is finally pitch black.

On these good days, you manage to find the perfect balance between online communication with friends and family—you’re not overwhelmed with Zoom call after FaceTime after text threads, but instead were able to put your phone down for a couple of hours and also finally got ahold of a girlfriend you’ve been meaning to catch up with during quarantine. (Maybe it’s just me, but during quarantine, levels of communication and the too-much and not-enough drastically affect my mood.)

The kind of day where you’re like, hey, this actually isn’t so bad?

And then there are the other kinds of days. These days are harder to talk about, and honestly a bit outside of my comfort zone when it comes to the writing I post publicly. I like to capture feel-good moments strung together by beautiful words. But that doesn’t mean in the slightest that’s what my life or brain is entirely composed of, because let me tell you, it's not.

Between April 3rd and today (& many days outside of this timeframe, in the past and inevitably in the future), there have been days that I wake up with such an incomprehensible dread, I truly don’t know how I’ll make it another ~16 hours before getting to go to sleep again. I’d like to preface this by saying that I fully understand that some humans experience these feelings of anxiety and/or depression on a daily basis, or have done so much prior to quarantine and social distancing becoming our normal. And so to be clear, I am not an expert on this topic by any means and I know that my quarantine-induced emotions do not compare to those who suffer from clinical anxiety or depression.

With that disclaimer (and with an unimaginable amount of empathy and love I feel towards the people described above—I have always been passionate about mental health awareness, but my personal struggle with it has been semi-minimal), the kind of anxiety and sadness that takes your breath away has been a defining feeling for me over the past month. Some of it has to do with hyper-focusing on the state of the world—I know I’m not alone in this. If I sit down and THINK about the insanely FUCKED UP things going on in our country, and the world...I try not to go down that rabbit hole too often because it makes me so goddamn sad, COVID-related and not.

On a more personal level, at the beginning of May I got furloughed. Another disclaimer: I have zero bad things to say about my company, their decision to follow through with furloughs, the way I was informed, etc. I feel very grateful and proud to work for an agency that a) kept all employees employed for as long as feasibly and financially possible and b) handled the situation with such transparency and professionalism.

That doesn’t mean it doesn’t suck. The last time in my life I recall having truly NOTHING to do for an extended period of time was before I turned 16 and got my first job at Kmart (shout out to the Ellisville Kmart in West County St. Louis, if you know you know). I had this weekend job for the rest of high school, and I was also, like, studying and learning and whatever else you do in high school (why does that feel like eons ago?). In college, there was always some kind of academic preparation to think about, even on winter breaks with reading assignments for the upcoming semester (or maybe that was just me and my liberal arts degree), and when I wasn’t focused on school I was still working at a restaurant or bar.

How do you do nothing? Doing nothing gives you a hell of a lot of time to think, to be alone with your thoughts, and if I’ve realized anything over the past 1.5 weeks (update: nearly 4 weeks now as I'm editing this) of being furloughed, it’s that there is a reason I have purposefully tried to make myself the busiest girl on the planet for the entirety of my adolescent/young adult life. Being alone with your thoughts is scary, and especially while living through a global pandemic, for me personally it has resulted in types of anxiety I have never before experienced.

The anxiety of waking up with a blank slate as your day is terrifying to me. I try to fill it with as many activities as I can—a run, a live workout class, a mundane household task. Today I will wipe down the kitchen cabinets. Tomorrow I will organize my email inbox. The next day I’ll sort through old T-shirts. Laundry. Vacuuming, again. Raking the tiny patch of grass next to my front patio. Brushing up on my Spanish (no humble brag here—this has been on my to-do list since the end of March). Adding old photos to Facebook. Re-organizing my jewelry organizer (?). Writing this blog.

To be clear, this is not me flexing about my unprecedented productivity during quarantine/furlough. In fact, quite the opposite. Accomplishing these little tasks when I wake up feeling dread—dread of the unknown, dread of boredom, dread of clocking another 24 hours doing nothing worthwhile—seems impossible.

And so, my friends, the days like that make the “little joys” mantra from my previous post actually laughable. On days like that, I get physically angry when a truck driving by my house is too loud, when there is a single cloud in the sky, when my avocado isn’t ripe enough. I feel guilty when I don’t work out, and I stare at my phone entirely too much and watch an obscene number of One Tree Hill episodes. I drink too much wine at night, or whiskey, and probably too early. I am not capable of having a “good” day or finding “little joys” (*scoff*) when my brain is spinning with personal and worldly thoughts of disaster.

So, the point of this blog post (if you’ve made it this far, thanks for listening to me ramble—I’m two glasses of wine deep and who even knows if my jumbled thoughts are tangible or relatable), is this: if you wake up one day, or most days, or every day, and the feelings of stress or anxiety or sadness or fear are so strong that you can’t fathom getting out of bed before 2pm and decide to consume entirely carbs for each meal and leave every friend on read—that is fucking okay.

It’s nice to look for the little joys in life. And I do believe that’s what will get us through, eventually. But you know what? You can look for the little joys tomorrow. And today, if you need to sit on your sunken-in couch or wrapped up in fuzzy blankets in your bed, and cry or listen to old-school Taylor Swift or order a pint of ice cream on Go Puff, fucking do it. You’re allowed. What we are going through is hard. If throwing up your middle finger to the little joys today is actually what’s gonna get you through, do it. That’s all.