What I’ve felt over the last two years has been a Billy from Family Circus path towards crummy mental health.
Since the pandemic started, I feel like I inverted and became an inside-out version of myself. I still had the same seams and colors but you could see every place where I was held together by a thread. Or less. Having diabetes (and having for so long) was a vulnerability I couldn’t ignore, and it made risk-assessment a full time job in our house. What invited the most risk, what activities involved the least risk. I always thought I was an extrovert but had to switch to introvert status overnight, pretending I was happy being home and being on Zoom and not having to wear jeans and making stupid jokes about people not having lower-halves of their bodies because they didn’t exist in that way on my screen.
I tried very hard to pretend it was normal, and that busy was better. I over-committed on some levels, really excited to have the opportunity to work with different events and organizations. The promise of seeing people – albeit through Zoom – was an exhilarating change of pace from the walls of my house. I wanted to be a part of something, to feel like we all weren’t apart from everything.
But I struggled to follow through. Zoom meetings suck. Virtual conferences are a good try but they still are a bummer when compared to being in the room with people you desperately want to hug or get coffee with or hug while holding a cup of coffee. I wanted to say yes to everything but then promptly stick a snorkel in my mouth, go up into my bed, and hide beneath the never-ending laundry pile. I had so many projects half-started. So many ambitions half-acknowledged. So many fears and concerns fully realized. Even when things started to improve slightly, it felt like the majority of the people around me remembered how to be people but I had forgotten and was instead trying to operate through human life while turning into a sad robot.
The depression was intense and overwhelming. I tried therapy. (Therapy through Zoom was not a helpful fit.) I tried writing. (I had nothing to say except one day I sat down and wrote the word “fuck” over and over again, using different font sizes and colors. That document is currently on my desktop, saved as “fuck.doc”) I tried eating my feelings. I tried exercising my feelings. I tried eating while exercising, which only produced unusually musical burps and didn’t do much for making me feel better. What I really needed was to stop pretending that being home and being with my family was enough to take away the intense fear I had of dying from this pandemic that was wrapping the world in cellophane and it was tough to breathe.
I tried explaining this to my home team but I’m not sure I did a good job. COVID vaccinations helped so much, and now that my children are halfway through being fully-vaccinated, my brain is less jumbled. My baseline panic is much lower. I don’t feel like I’m buzzing with anxiety and what-if all day long. (Only some of the day. But that’s progress.)
I’ve started leaving the house more, interacting with people more, and I’m feeling more like the human being I might have been two years ago. I had forgotten how much I loved small talk with cashiers and people at school pick up line. I had forgotten how much I enjoyed casually observing people doing their thing.
Yesterday, in the grocery store parking lot, I listened to a woman using voice-to-text to compose a message. Her speech was slow and deliberate. I could hear her clearly from five parking spots away.
“You … can … fuck all the way … off.” Brief pause. “Period.” And then she shoved her phone deep into her purse.
I live for this stuff.
The generalized anxiety is worse, the depression is better. I’ve learned-ish to establish and respect my own boundaries, and the boundaries of others. I hope I’ve grown through this experience. I might have also picked up some crummy habits and potentially torched a few relationships but that’s the fallout. Shit happens during a global health crisis.
Today, I went for a walk on a local beach and the sun was really bright. It was fucking cold outside. Seagulls were walking along the shore in their weird bird way, with fast-forward feet and not moving their arms (can you call their wings arms?), inspecting bits of busted crab shell from where the waves were breaking. There weren’t many people out but the ones who were said hello, or waggled their gloved fingers at me.
The music in my ears was loud. I had a jar of glucose tabs in my hand. The air filling my lungs was cold and I felt more human in those moments than I have in any of the last twenty months.
