Quarantine Diaries, Ready or Not
Its been weeks since I’ve written a blog post or newsletter. People have even asked me, “Hey, where are those awesome newsletters you’ve been writing?! They are so great!” But the truth is, for so long during this pandemic, I’ve felt quite shitty. I’ve had moments where I honestly feel really good. I feel good in the sense that I feel grateful for my job and appreciative for my family and my partner to go through this all with. I still have the moments of fear and doubt when I wonder why this is happening or when is it all going to end? It has been a seesaw of emotions, that seems to change every second. And all we can really do is allow ourselves to feel. To go through the motions, to ride the wave and to just feel it out all the way through.
What I did not want to do was write to you guys from a solemn place, about how hard this all is and how much it sucks, but try to put a positive spin on it. Everyone already knows how hard it is. This crisis has not spared anyone. It doesn’t care what race you are, status, religion, or how much money you make. It has affected us all and we may be going through it in quarantine, but we are going through it together. But this feeling that we are all feeling, I couldn’t bring myself to even write about it. It took me a while to feel the emotions and to face them.
I didn’t want my negative energy to spill out and affect anyone else. So instead I just didn’t write. To be honest, aside from my gratitude journal, I haven’t written much of anything during this quarantine. And at times it hurts, because I wonder why I’m not doing more. And at times, it feels like exactly what I need. To just take a damn second to be present. To reflect. To sit quietly. To think. To hope. To pray. To feel.
I guess I’ve been waiting for the right time. The right time to sit with my laptop and my thoughts and to feel good and to have only the good thoughts swirling in my head. Well the truth is, that moment rarely ever shows up when you need it to. And when it does it brings the good thoughts with the bad. It shows up when you least expect it to or when the timing is the absolute worst. Writing is what I love to do. I love to share my thoughts, to communicate through words on a page. To pour my head and heart out onto the keys and watch what unfolds on the screen. It’s cathartic and real and usually only slightly edited, because I kind of hate editing.
In light of keeping it as real as possible, this week has been particularly rough for a number of reasons. Reasons that I’m sure you can guess since many of you are probably experiencing similar things. It’s a Friday afternoon, approximately 50 something days into quarantine, as I write this and it feels like the “perfect” time to sit down and just let it all go. It’s been raining all day and the sun finally came out. So I grabbed my laptop and went to sit out on the balcony. I was feeling READY to write. I just had a conversation with one of my dear friends and we shared some insights about this whole quarantine and things that we hoped to take away when all of this was over.
The second I sat down, tiny droplets of water began to drip down on the screen of my computer. I’ve waited 7 weeks for the perfect moment and when it finally came, it literally started raining down on me. You can’t make this shit up!
In a lot of ways, that’s how life works, isn’t it? We spend our whole lives waiting. We’re molding and shaping and we wait in anticipation for things to be perfect before we make a move. More often than not, we wait so long that by the time we are in fact “ready” it’s too late. Such is life.
Before all of this, we all had plans. We were going to go out to dinner with friends, we were going to take trips with our families, we were planning for life’s big events that we couldn’t wait to happen! We were living our lives and maybe even taking them for granted.
None of us have ever experienced anything like this. We’ve essentially been sent to our rooms and are being forced to think about how we were living our lives before COVID-19. Were we living excessively beyond our means? Were we taking people or relationships for granted? Were we living life on autopilot without really any intention or direction to follow through on?
All of this time makes us think. It makes us crazy at times, but maybe we all needed a minute to just stop. Maybe we needed to reflect on how we were living and why we were doing the things we were doing. And what we were sinking our time into or wasting our time away with. Maybe we needed the mirror to be held up for us because we were always too busy to hold it up for ourselves.
This time, however tough and crazy and sad it may feel at times, is out of our control. This time is precious, if you can see it that way. Because it highlights what really matters. It highlights what's important. Your health. Your family and the people you love. And while jobs and making a living is of course important, in the grand scheme of things it is not first or even second on the list when crisis strikes. The number of people who lost their jobs is far greater than that number of people who lost their lives thus far. We will bounce back, however that may look, whenever that may be, and we will be better for it.
The last thing I want to leave you with is this… enjoy and appreciate the moments that feel good right now, because they are few and far between. I’m slowly but surely coming back into my writing practice and it feels so good to step away from the world for a minute and sort out how I’m feeling on the page.
Do the things that you need to do to take care of yourself. Yes take care of the people around you that need you and rely on you. But also, do the things that you need to get through. Don’t feel guilty for enjoying the things that make you feel good. Don’t feel guilty that you have your health, your family or your job. Appreciate those things even more right now. This pandemic has changed so much so quickly we don’t know what tomorrow will bring. Be grateful for all that you have right now and for all that you don’t have right now.
We are all in this together. We will get out of this together, too.
stay home.
stay safe.
