Downers in the Time of Corona
When the threat of an impending lockdown loomed in march I thought I was mentally prepared to take on the resulting isolation. Being an introvert, I felt the superpower of finding joy just by being around myself would finally come to use. I’m one of those people who derives utmost satisfaction from cancelled plans. Sometimes there’s nothing that takes the weight off like committing to something and later knowing it’s been scrapped. Liking wiping off a speck of dirt from an otherwise clean mirror. Soothing.
So in my head I was prepared.
“I can easily go a month without people around”, the brain said in defiance.“In fact. That’d be great, wont it?”
For more than a decade I’ve secretly harboured an awkward fascination for self sufficiency and solitude. And with the bubbling energy of late teens relayed on to my early twenties, I was ready to pull off a Walden and run off into the woods in order to live a simpler isolated life. There was some subconscious need to ape the feeling of liberty that Christopher McCandless represented as seen in the film Into the Wild. These feelings had been repeatedly evoked due to the incoming deluge of responsibilities and being exposed to a variety of philosophies born from my newfound joy for reading.
But throughout my 20s, I was exposed to the new ambivert world of social connections. And so I got entrenched into this new social media based existence of being constantly connected. No matter how much I craved for isolation, the fear of missing out somehow dragged me back in. And before I knew it, I turned 30. My running off into the woods moment never came. On the contrary, I got even more embedded into the system.
So when the news broke out that a pandemic would force people to live shut behind their doors, I saw this as an opportunity to look inward. To introspect. A time by myself, that would save me from all the NO’s i use to shoot down invites that come my way ‘cause I have a thing’.
But nothing…nothing prepared me for this.
Before the lockdown/s began, I diligently started making plans for how I would split my day into chunks that would keep me away from soullessly staring into nothingness. But like most plans, I only planned for the most efficient version of myself. I planned as if I was an automaton with no need for rest, and being productive for 16 hours with 8 hours of sleep and rest squeezed (somewhere) in between. It was a plan far removed from reality, only to pacify myself that I’ll stay sane and normal through this phase.
But my belief for self reliance had started coming undone right at the start. For which I swiftly scurried off to my parents place in Kerala.
It started off fairly well. I was sleeping on time, eating on time. Working the rest. I started slipping in a bit of exercise to get some endorphins running. My dopamine induced weekends of pizza chomping and binge drinking were neatly replaced by portion controlled home food and 11pm lights out. Hours turned to days turned to weeks turned to months. The cycle went on. The days started bleeding into each other. Was it a Thursday today?
The only way I was able to differentiate between days was based on my work schedule calendar. Even that wasn’t registering well with memory. My daily bullet journal sat empty most days in it’s uninspired stagnancy. Time: the past, present and future became a bulbous mush. There was nothing much to look forward to for most weeks. The weekends would pass by unnoticed. The graph of life enthusiasm was on a downward spiral.
But at the end of it all, it’s all okay, right? I’m not sick. I’m not infected. I’m healthy, I should be happy with what I have. Appreciate the things that I have, rather than behave like a spoilt brat who pushes a BMW into a river cause he wanted a Jaguar instead!
Meet Anxiety. Barging in like an uninvited guest, taking up all the space on your couch and throwing around a pack of chips all over while staring at you right in the eyes just cause it felt like it. And no, you can’t just show it the door and it’ll politely walk out. It sits there, walks around, does what it wants. And all you can do it observe it wreaking havoc.
I’ve generally been an advocate of the ideology that everything can be meticulously rationalised and mitigated through cold logic. But when wave after wave of anxiety washes over like the sea approaching high tide, rationalising that anxiety down with cold logic only leads to more anxiety. Great! So now you’ve essentially got two people throwing potato chips all around your house while staring at you, one who barged in earlier and the other who you thought would come to solve the issues with the first one.
And the tough nut to crack in the case of lockdown induced anxiety is the sense of claustrophobia being limited to the four walls of your house. There’s no change in location that mentally lets you unwind. There’s the abject feeling of being stuck. Cause the anxiety that barged in to your house, is now your roommate. The sort that eats up the sandwich you made while you were away hunting for the jar of mustard. The messy sort that always blames you when things go wrong. The one you don’t want to be around, but follows you like a shadow.
So then how do you deal with it? How do you get over the feeling of suffocation? Suffocated either from isolation or even from having people around. The lack of a feeling of peace and calm.
There are a plenty of people out there who do point out that these feelings of anxiety are reserved for the privileged who aren’t out there battling COVID or struggling to get through the day. And I did fall prey to that. I felt bad that I was whining all the time, when I was supposed to be grateful about the things I have. But from what I’ve experienced, mental health issues don’t work that way. You can’t assuage those thoughts just by reminding yourself that there are people worse off. You still have to live with it. Deal with it. Cause it exists.
And the only honest metric to get an idea of it, is just to accept what you feel. To probably see those thoughts as a transient part of you that needs to be addressed. This is where getting professional help is necessary. Yes, there can be ways to relieve these overwhelming feelings by talking to friends and family. But just thinking of it like any physical ailment, it’s best to go see a professional than read up on the 200+ ways webMD claims you might have cancer.
I’m not here with any solutions, or with the intent of selling the perfect panacea. I’m still in the thick of it. Going through each day, facing demons that come in various shades of downers. Fighting that sinking feeling that makes you consistently question “What’s the point of all this anyway!”. The endless What if’s which float around in a torrent of thoughts that gobble you up like mental quicksand. It is rough.
The thoughts that start with “When the pandemic ends, I’ll be…” make it much worse. Cause it gives you this hope that the sense of normalcy is dependent on external events which might be just around the corner. Whereas all we need is to focus on the present and ourselves.
Breathe.
