These days I find it takes twice as long to do half as much because we use all of our energy trying to just get through the day. I keep saying this over and over because the truth of this assertion continues to blindside me when I least expect it. And, this seems true across the board, or at least, for the people I know and see. On the continuum of responses to the pandemic, I think of Hubs and me as moderately concerned NJ residents. We wear our masks when we go to the grocery store or any public place like that, we don’t do unnecessary errands, and have kept distance from others outside our tiny five-person circle. We are not panicked. We are inconvenienced. By contrast, we know families who are locked up in their homes, who have sectioned off areas of their home in order to protect family members by catagory. So, there is a section for the particular family member who is the designated errand person, a section for the college age children, and yet a third section for the elderly grandparents. Their thought is that that family member doing errands could be contagious, and could bring the virus into their home thus endangering the lives of the others. I also know other people who are steeped in the idea of the pandemic being a conspiracy, who feel controlled by the government, who will not wear a mask and who angrily challenge anyone who suggests they do. It doesn’t matter. Whatever the reaction to this pandemic, it costs a lot of emotional energy to manage what used to be the routine of life.
Hubs, for all my talk about his expensive and complicated hobbies, is a man of few needs in the world of working from home. He is a geologist and works for an engineering firm that does pollution remediation. He sits at his “regular seat” at the kitchen table where you can find him from about 6AM until somewhere between 3-5PM. As far as I can see, in order to perform his job, he requires five essentials items: his laptop, the mouse, a plug, a pad of paper and his mechanical pencil. Early in the day, there’s a cup of coffee added to this list, but mostly those five items are it. Occasionally, he has a video conference where he and his colleagues have conversations about things like homogenous stratigraphy and other concepts that make exactly zero sense to me, but, otherwise he sits at the table silently working away, cleaning up the planet. For 9 to 11 hours a day, for all intents and purposes, he is like a fixture in the dining area of our kitchen.
I, on the other hand, have what might be the most beautiful work space out of anyone I know. I have a studio office over the garage that is semi-attached to my house where I have been working every day since mid-March. I call it my tree house. It is brand-new, designed for and by me, decorated with great attention to detail. It is spacious, has exceptional lighting, and is two stories high which means I can look out over the trees and watch the birds. Every day, I pour a cup of coffee for myself and make the 40-step commute to work. I have a glass water pitcher with little engraved hearts, really nice lunches that I have the time to make for myself, and a diffuser pumping out the aroma of my choice. I feel almost shamefully blessed to have this kind of space to begin with, let alone to have this space at such a critical time. I have a friend who has been working in her 15’X20’ kitchen for two months. I have friends who are sharing their one tiny office where one works by day and the other by night. And still, it takes me twice as long to do half as much because it takes so much emotional energy to manage what used to be the routine of life.
I miss the things that seemed so mundane. For whatever reason, alone time doesn’t count for me unless I am alone in the house and alone in my own head. For instance, I used to have Mondays off and I spent that day getting ready for the week. I did really unremarkable things on Mondays, barely worth mentioning: cleaning out the fridge, prepping meals for the week, laundry, organizing, errands, creating the up-coming week’s schedule, reviewing the craft supplies for when the children visit on the weekend, contemplating moving a piece of furniture from here to there, all in the comfort of my own house without anyone there to interrupt. Really, nothing I did was actually noteworthy. And, there is nothing to say that I cannot still take Mondays off and do a lot of that stuff, except for one thing. No matter what day it is, Hubby is sitting right there at the kitchen table and, trite as it is to say, his mere presence bothers me. HE doesn’t bother me, but just the fact that he is there and that I am not alone bothers me. THIS is what I mean when I say that it takes so much emotional energy to manage our lives. And, it isn’t, obviously, Hubs’ presence. It is that there is so little left of my actual life that his presence becomes an intrusion. Prior to the pandemic, if he would have been home on a Monday, I would barely have noticed. I had way too many priorities, way too much to accomplish on my day off, to be bothered by him sitting there. I worked three twelve hours days beginning Tuesday through Thursday, and a half day on Friday, so Monday was my ready-set-go day.
I can see the same pattern in a client of mine who is about the most upset person I know over social distancing. On his best day, this guy is a cynic. He is a charming cynic, but a cynic all the same. He has strong opinions which he is happy to share with you, and could literally not care less if you are offended by anything he says. He is a fiercely loyal friend, politically right of right, a Second Amendment defender who is, ironically, loved by more people than you can imagine. My client had a full life before March of 2020. He worked five days a week where he frequently interacted with people of all ages. People he works with know that they can come to him at any time, for anything and that he will come through for them. Children routinely come to him to help them solve problems. He functions as a safe space for them. Now my client is quarantined at home and he has lost all of that. With no external life, with no one in his life except for his wife, he now spends his days sitting home watching the news. Each time I speak to him, he indicates that he is feeling controlled by the government and that his rights and freedom are being taken away. None of that actually alarms me. I can get his context and understand why he would feel this way. What does worry me though is that he is angry about everything. He is now hyper-focused on things that he never even would have noticed before, or, if he did, he certainly wouldn’t have bothered being mad about them. He might have stored them away for later, turning them into a good story to share with a friend over a glass of wine or a cup of coffee, but now, he just walks around angry and upset all day long.
And, as ridiculous as this sounds, I cannot help but think that one little run to Homegoods, or a quick dash out to Target, or even just run to the food store without my Hazmat equipment would make it all better. These days, when I walk into a food store and see everyone walking around wearing masks, my neurological system registers panic. I know that I will not be able to smile at anyone and they will not smile at me. We can’t. We are now the Masked-people from planet Danger and on planet Danger we do not smile, or exchange a casual comment, or ask unnecessary questions. We robotically move through the store, silently putting things into our carts, waiting in long lines made up mostly of space, so we can take our purchases back to our homes to sanitize, so we can use them freely without concern. This all makes me crazy. It is ridiculous. It is necessary. It is infuriating. Those are the thoughts that float around in my head. Ridiculous, necessary, infuriating. Over and over. In between the ridiculous-necessary-infuriating cycle of thoughts, I tell myself to take a breath. Then I insist I take another one. In and out. Slowly. I tell myself that it is okay to feel upset, these are upsetting times. I tell myself to be kind to myself, that self-care is important, that I am doing a great job managing my life. I tell myself that the Universe is unfolding exactly as it should. I remind myself that I have always, always believed that the Universe is unfolding exactly as it should, so that these times, these very hard times, are not an exception. This soothing self-talk functions like an emotional GPS system that returns me to myself. It takes a lot to manage the internal emotional experience that isolation brings and that is exactly what we are being forced to do. So much of life as we knew it has been eclipsed. Our previous lives are images we can barely still see in our rear-view mirrors, while out of the front windshield we have a full view of the unknown. Miles and miles of the unknown with no signs indicating how many miles until we reach the next rest stop.