I was talking with a friend the other day when I realized something: Sheltering in place is like driving a car. Hear me out.
Working from home has been a huge shift from my normal workday. The way the hours slide together makes it difficult to ever feel fully alert or fully relaxed. A few years back, I had a different job. I loved it, but it was in a city almost 2 hours away from where I lived. I feel a lot like how I felt back then, spending 4 hours a day commuting by car. I feel like I’m stuck in traffic. I have to pay attention to what I’m doing, because there’s still a chance that an accident could happen - but all that really entails is keeping my eyes open and my foot on the brake. Stop, go. Stop, go. Mind-numbing, sedentary, but still kind of dangerous.
You know that feeling when you pull off the freeway and realize you don’t remember most of the drive? It felt like you were going nowhere, but time was passing all the while. Time moves strangely in quarantine. Something that happened yesterday feels like it happened ages ago. Things feel like they’re happening at a glacial pace - and then I blink and another week has gone by. Two weeks. Seven. My last full day onsite at work was March 17th, incidentally the same day my clinic called to cancel my cycle. It feels like a lifetime has passed since then, but in reality it’s only been about 2 months. In that time, there have been 2 extensions to the local stay-at-home order, 4 updates to ASRM’s treatment recommendations, and approximately one million emails all starting with the phrase “In these uncertain times...” The creative energy we used to complete long-ignored household projects in the first few weekends has faded, and a general sense of malaise has come creeping in. Each day feels like a repeat of the last. Stop, go. Stop, go.
You know that feeling when you’re stuck in traffic, and you wonder what would happen if you floored it into the car in front of you? Of course you’d never do it; someone could get hurt, to say nothing of your insurance deductible. But there’s a little voice in the back of your head saying “maybe it would feel really good to break something.” There are some romantic-sounding theories about that feeling - l’appel du vide - and what it means about humanity’s relationship to life and death and the macabre. But I feel more like a little kid who's been told for the umpteenth time to just please hush and sit still. Like if I don’t get to run around right now, right this very minute I’m going to break something, or punch my brother, or do something else naughty that I won’t be able to explain. I’m restless. I think we’re all restless, and that’s why so many of us are drawn into self-destructive patterns right now - overeating, drinking too much, not sleeping. Stop, go. Stop, go. We’ve been stuck in traffic for 2 months. It’s only human to want to act out.
So what helps? Hope, for one thing. But hope is a tricky thing when the future is so murky. My 2-hour commute sucked, but I knew that eventually, sometime that day, I would get home. My life wouldn't continue in that weird in-between isolation of the cab of my truck forever. These days, sometimes hope feels easy, and sometimes it feels impossibly unrealistic. I keep cycling through the same apps, refreshing the same web pages, looking for something new. Either Google's algorithms have gotten uncannily good at predicting my searches, or we're all asking the same set of questions. I type "timeline" and immediately get "CA shutdown" and "1918 Spanish Flu" and "Coronavirus symptoms." Some of our questions can be answered, while others remain as unclear as ever. I guess for now, we just have to trust that we're still moving forward, even when it feels like we're stuck in place.
Are you sheltering in place? What gives you hope when things feel difficult?
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