Living Dead Girl

I think I could just sleep.  All the time right now.

I used to buoyantly refer to this time we're currently living through as "Sparkling Isolation."  It doesn't seem like too long ago.  Twenty days ago, as I look at my calendar.  A month ago.  It was still easier to maintain a good sense of humor back then.  Smiles felt natural, still.

It's begun feeling like Pandemic Purgatory.  

The edges are starting to feel like they're fraying around here.  Zoe has started complaining as much about home-school as she did about school-school. My husband has done up many of the home-fix-it projects he hasn't had time for over the last while.

Maybe the grind is a little more concentrated for them because there's no getting away from it.  When you GO to work, you get to LEAVE work.  When you GO to school, you get to LEAVE school.  When you're working or schooling at home, there's no leaving.  You're always there.  You see the same walls.  You hear the same sounds.  You smell the same smells.  If you're like us, you fall into a rut of eating kind of the same stuff, over and over.  You do the same stuff, over and over again.  

One day runs into the next.  

Even before Pandemic Purgatory, Home and Work were the same locale for me.  Things sort of ran together.  I felt like I ran in the background, unnoticed, and I certainly felt as frayed around the edges as my daughter and my husband are starting to seem.  But at least there were the external routines that reminded me what day it was.  Now it feels like: Saturday, Tuesday (my husband is allowed to practice at his office on Tuesdays for true emergency patients), Saturday, Saturday, Saturday, Saturday, and Saturday.  I don't really leave my house.  There isn't anywhere for me to go, and no reason for me to go there.  

I've passed the point of wanting to accomplish Great Things during Sparkling Isolation- I had read that Sir Isaac Newton came up with Calculus while working from home during the quarantine during the Plague of 1665-1666.  I started to feel fairly optimistic about my creative prospects.  I have learned what I honestly already knew.  I'm no Sir Isaac Newton.  I'm not even Lady Fig Newton.  

I think I feel most like Living Dead Girl.  I still get up every day at the same time I did when school was still running.  I still get stuff done.  I think I've done an impressive job of keeping the laundry folded and put away.  This is the best my laundry room has looked for the longest stretch of time I can remember.  I actually think I could probably go in there and organize it up like a Pinterest Fail version of those Pinteresty laundry rooms, at this point, since there are no baskets or piles of clean clothes indefinitely on deck for folding.  But that's the "Living" girl part.  "Living Dead Girl" still gets the work done, but I swear, I could just lie down on the couch and sleep for hours a day.  That's what I'd really like to do, truth be told.  

I've read that that isn't so abnormal right now, either.  There's a lot of intense emotional information for us to process right now, whether we're aware of it or not.  There's a lot of anxiety and worry.  That tires a person out.  Maybe in order to feel less like Living Dead Girl and more like myself, I need to spend a few days sacked out under my gravity blanket on the couch.  I'd like to think Living Dead Girl isn't just who I am from now on.  I hope not!  

This won't last forever, Friends, even if it feels like it has, is, and will be forever.  We all have to do what we need to do to get through each day.  I'm right here in the trenches with you, appropriately distanced, although you wonder, was there appropriate distance with trench warfare?  I guess there is during this trench warfare.  Take care of yourselves, Friends, especially if you're also feeling like Living Dead Girl.