“Is that beeping in my head?”
Shortly after noon, when the lunchtime pick-me-up has worn off and morning coffee is a distant memory, I find myself asking this question.
I look to the cat. He blinks, eyes glowing in a sunbeam; it’s cute, sure. But his pupils are little black slits.
A little creepy?
Understatement of the century.
He looks like Voldemort coming back to life, slithering out of the smoking cauldron. But I should go easy on my four-legged counterpart. He’s all muddled up, not quite sure where the void is; he just knows something’s off.
“No,” comes a shout from the bedroom.
That beeping is the garbage truck backing up.
The human is lying in the sun, too, reading a book. She spent the morning cutting up a shirt with a pair of dull scissors. Homemade-mask-making is a good way to kill an hour. Not sure how effective they’ll be, though.
In a way, it doesn’t even matter if they get used or not. What matters is that we keep our merry-go-roundsspinning, our feet moving, our minds nourished, and, if needed, our fists at the ready. The 2 pm trench comes when I start wondering what we all do: how much longer will this go on? Is it time to cook a meal again? Good God…
I spent my 26th birthday yesterday in isolation. That sounds like such a negative word, and it can be: the truth of the matter is that these days, I have to work a little harder than I normally would to come up with reasons as to why it was a good day. The reasons are still there, just as they would be if it were a normal birthday: family, hugs, cake, deep belly laughs, and Van Morrison on the kitchen iPod dock. Today, my list feels bland: the sun is out. The fridge isn’t empty. Most everyone I care about is healthy. As each day goes by, and the COVID-19 cases rise, less and less of us can say that, so don’t go forgetting it.
More than anything, I worry about people’s well-being. That 2 pm slog is fuelled by novel rationalities that I’m used to attributing to my own shortcomings. A sense of doom born from a lifetime of rattling a bottle of SSRIs every morning like some chemical alarm clock dissolving in the pit of my stomach.
My depression doesn’t have to always be depressing, nor does it have to be because of something internal. Sometimes it is, and that’s fine, but put your time into working hard in those daily, petty, seemingly insignificant ways to keep the quarantine cauldron bubbling. If there’s no heat, there’s no bubbles. Don’t be afraid if those normal positives aren’t coming up to the surface with a pop, or if you just feel like garbage, a little cold, and have no energy. It’s a natural survival instinct to preserve energy when the future’s uncertain.
Heat and pressure make change; if the heat’s gone, muscle through with a bit of naked pressure. See what happens. I bet something will shift.