I'm doing better than last Monday.
In fact, all last week, I did better than I was doing last Monday. Nadir Monday. I think . . . .
The thing about this historical event we are all living through is that it will change us. It has to change us. We have to change in response to it. And change is hard. And forced change made rapidly out of fear and necessity is harder. Psychologically, we aren't built for that. It's bound to take it toll.
I've been thinking a lot about what's not so important and what is. In the "not" column are a lot of numbers: weight on the scale, size of my clothing, number of York Peppermint Patties I consume in a day, number of screen minutes my kid gets in a day after he's finished all his schoolwork, number of projects actually completed. These are utterly unimportant to whether we live healthily and happily.
What is important sometimes does sometimes involve numbers too. Regarding health, for instance, I'm just not worrying about weight and size numbers anymore, but I am going to continue to worry about numbers related bloodwork, blood pressure and cardiovascular health. Those numbers bear no real relation to the size of my clothing and the force of gravity on my body on this early. At best, the relationship between the two is marginal. (How do I know: I've been "overweight" a large portion of my adult life and I can assure you that my bloodwork and blood pressure have been good-to-excellent for decades.) But bloodwork, blood pressure and whether I can walk a mile or more with relative ease are measures of health that seem to matter with regard to how I feel and how I function. So those are what I will pay attention to henceforth.
The number of hugs given and gotten is a happy number. The number of laughs with your family . . . the number of times your child's eyes light up . . . the number of chin licks from the dog . . . the number of York Peppermint Patties to give you joy of them . . . . These are also good numbers.
But number of blog posts about a scary event . . . not so much.
I noticed last week that when I stopped writing so much about this event, I stopped thinking so much about it. When I'm not physically writing, I'm still writing. I put together ideas, words and phrases, sentences, even whole paragraphs, in my head before I even put fingers to keyboard. Because I have a good memory, I can do that and then come back to the keyboard and unload it all. Then I edit. It's how my work-writing works too. Letting ideas form and reform, marinating in my brain, before I ever commit them to paper or the digital screen just works for me. But it also means that my brain is marinating in whatever it is I am writing or intending to write. It's why sometimes my work is so exhausting . . . because I don't just quit at quitting time, when I'm writing something. I can't. That's not how my writing brain works. It keeps working. So any brief I've written for work, for instance, has been written over many days and many moments of so-called free time.
Last week, after my Monday post, I decided not to write any further posts that week. Shutting off that self-imposed task allowed me shut off my brain about the pandemic. I mean, I still thought about it. But I didn't ruminate, marinate, write and rewrite in my head. And that was good for me, very, very good for me.
So I've decided to cut back writing this disjointed history for my own well-being. I'll check in once a week, maybe. Check in, as well, if I have a good story to tell, like The Frog. But I am taking the pressure off myself to write and, really, to perform here in this blog.
I do think, sometimes, in hubris, that maybe this blog would be a useful document in 50 or 100 years to study the effects of the pandemic on regular folks. Maybe it will. And maybe it won't. But if it will, a few fewer blog posts to save my sanity will not hobble any future historian's work. (Hello there, future historian. Creepy, huh?) Mine will be but one drop in a sea of personal narratives about the novel coronavirus/COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. I'm sure that their dissertation or historical extract will not suffer from my writing less, and less often. In fact, maybe the fact of it will be just the anecdote they need for their chapter on mental health. (You're welcome, future historian.)
Stay safe, friends.
