Quarantine Diaries: Losing Steam

We’ve been in quarantine for a very long time! While there have been ups and downs throughout, there is the ever-approaching point of resignation.

After the first few weeks of being confined to my home, I decided that remaining in my pajamas all day was making me feel, for lack of a better word, icky. So I starting getting dressed, doing my hair, and putting on makeup and this made a world of difference. It allowed me to hold on to the routine that I knew and made me feel a lot more productive. I was getting more done because I was “ready for the day”.

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This was my mode of operation for a few months, but lately the days that I didn’t feel like changing out of my sweats were becoming more and more frequent. I was losing steam. It dawned on me that this is more than just an extended summer; neither August nor September will bring the sweet relief us optimists have been hoping for. I watched the light at the end of the tunnel grow smaller as it slid further away into the winter months and possibly beyond.

In all honesty, I sat in this negative space for a while, until I adjusted my angle. Instead of dwelling on how long quarantine will last, I starting appreciating how much time I had in front of me to devote to projects and self-improvement. I realize that’s not an original train of thought, many people have been preaching this from Week 1 of lockdown. However, you can’t fully absorb this advice until you reach that point of hopelessness.

And just like that, I was refueled! Not to say that every moment of every day is pure joy, there are definitely times when I want to curl up in a ball with a pint of ice cream and live out the rest of the year like that. But I have a renewed sense of energy towards my internship. I’ve been pouring more of myself into that work, because that’s my “quarantine project”. My whole life, I’ve had to split my time and energy between different assignments, projects, and groups of people. With all of that taken away, I can devote everything to my internship.

And I’m no longer looking at the situation as “I have nothing else to do”, but rather “I have nothing else I have to do”. And there’s a lot of peace in that.