Today is the 6-month mark on being at home for lockdown/social distancing measures. I last wrote at the 80-day point and it has now been another 100 days since then!
First, it’s really unbelievable how quickly lockdown has gone. Apparently, that probably is because our days are so monotonous and similar to each other that there is less for our brains to form memories around and store, hence it feeling like not much time has passed.
In my last post, I was really focused on entertaining myself or finding ways of distracting myself. In the beginning of lockdown, I was looking at the number of cases and deaths every day and glued to social media as everything was progressing and changing so quickly. It was really helpful to focus on creative outlets. That’s definitely been a huge outlet during this time.
As time has gone on, though, I feel like it’s been about finding ways to manage the anxiety of an uncertain future – nothing is certain for the next two years at the very least. On a day-to-day basis, it feels like something new could happen at any time. One day, there may be a wave of anti-police-brutality sentiment. The next, there may be a heat wave that will set 2 million acres of land on fire and force half a million people to evacuate their homes. The longer this goes on, the more we have to deal with all the other problems going on in the world on top of the pandemic. Not only that, but the direct effects of the pandemic will force us to face some of this issues more head-on than we might have otherwise.
It’s been exhausting and draining staying up to date with the events that have been happening this year. It would feel easier to just lock myself away and ignore everything, but it also feels impossible. It also wouldn’t help at all. But the weight of police shootings, mass eviction, an economic downturn, devastating natural disasters, and probably many other things on top of having our routines turned upside down, the unprecedented uncertainty, and the isolation of not being able to see friends and family is unsurprisingly wearing on me.
It feels so selfish to be complaining about my routines and boundaries being uprooted, but I feel like that has been the root of my feelings of productivity (and the resulting guilt) and the sense of being lost about what I should be doing day-to-day. I am not someone who can easily work from home. Not having a dedicated workspace only makes things more difficult. It’s impossible to not be distracted and it’s hard to maintain those elements of “hygiene” like not looking at your phone all the time, starting work at a decent time, ending work at a decent time, not working at home, not working on the weekend, etc. These are things I was working on quite hard before the pandemic began. I was really good at finishing work before coming home and using my living space to wind down and create boundaries. Things like that are nearly impossible when you can see your couch from your desk and you’re working from the same room that your kitchen is in.
I’ve also learned this year that online courses are not good for my learning style, I really need to do more experiments in my lab to progress with my research, I thrive on in-person discussion to develop my research ideas, and I really miss hallway interactions with my peers. The way things are now, I feel very disconnected from my work life, which makes focus and motivation impossible to hold on to for more than about 10 minutes at a time (once a day, if I’m lucky).
Some good has come out of this time for me, though. I have learned things about what wasn’t working before the pandemic. I really needed to work less, move more, and spend more time doing things that gave me energy. I was working six or seven days a week before, and often around 10-12 hours per day. I haven’t been working weekends during this time and I hope I can keep my weekends for everything but working moving forward. It has made a massive difference.
Because I was working so much, I wasn’t really making time to prioritize exercise. I was walking to and from campus every day, which was at least a couple miles of walking, so it wasn’t like I was being completely sedentary. But I have been trying to put exercise back into my routine and it’s another thing I hope will be a long-term change. Back in April, we decided to try to run three times a week for 10 weeks to work up to running 5k. We did actually do the 10 weeks, but right around the 10-week mark, I had some health issues, which I will discuss below, and I fell out of the routine. In the past few weeks, since I have recovered, I have been trying to get back into it. It was much easier to get back to running for 30 minutes (with quite a lot of walking during my “run”) the second time!
Last, I really needed to focus on creative outlets and working on things that would give me energy, rather than sucking out what little motivation and hope I had left. If it was something that made me put down my phone and social media, double bonus! I started crocheting for just this reason! I was in a slump for a little while, but in the past 6 months, I’ve made quite a few things. The most notable creation was this massive blanket!
So that’s a little insight to how I’ve been feeling the past six months. Tl;dr it has sucked. But I have been trying really hard to make it suck less. I’ve also been trying to reflect on what has happened and what I’ve done during this time. So here’s some events of the past six months:
- I’ve read 22 books in lockdown! Every book I finished this year, I read in lockdown.
- We went hiking a few times and we went camping for one night.
- I bought a sewing machine and learned to sew as well as how to carve linoleum stamps and some basic embroidery stitches.
- I had a kidney infection.
- I had to get surgery and was in and out of doctors appointments for 2 months.
- We got a garden plot in our community garden and have been growing vegetables.
- I finally caught up on most of the blog posts I needed to write.
- We learned to cook a lot of new recipes. I bought a pasta roller and made ravioli. We’ve learned to use new ingredients. We have made some pretty elaborate meals.
- We decorated the apartment. We moved in about a month before lockdown, so we’ve acquired furniture, put things on the wall, rearranged rooms, and more during lockdown.
- I turned 24.
- I went to a protest after George Floyd’s murder.
- We had a film club and watched movies with friends over the internet. We’ve watched a bunch of movies I had never seen: Parasite, the Godfather, Mad Max, among many others. We also had a Studio Ghibli marathon one day.
- Like I mentioned before, I picked up running, didn’t run for a few months, and then started back again.
- I saw the bioluminescence for the first time.
- We’ve given each other two haircuts.
- We’ve been fermenting everything. We have a sourdough starter and a kombucha SCOBY. We’ve been making pickles. We’ve also bypassed fermentation by learning how to make vegan cheese from scratch (several different ways!).
- I presented at a conference and I have another conference presentation this week.
It seems like we’re going to be living this way for a lot longer. Maybe another 6 months. Another year? I don’t know. It’s hard to imagine what the next six months are going to look like. Case number are already going back up, there’s an election, we have several more months of wildfire season. What I’m learning is that I have to focus on my routines and the areas of my life I can control to better handle the bigger things going on. I hope even if things don’t get better, I can try to deal with things better.
Stay safe and stay sane.
