Not thought leader

Okay, upfront: yes, I'm sorry. I wish I could write about something OTHER than my life on lockdown and maybe eventually there will be something about knitting or quilting (I just got caught up with grading for the day right now, and I have my last advanced biostats class at 3 pm - tomorrow, no exams so maybe I do something else?)

I know it's boring and tiresome and I don't blame y'all if you're not reading any more. I hope some day to have a fun and interesting blog again. I don't want to totally put the blog into mothballs because I need somewhere to write and I want to have some kind of record of this time (at least for as long as Blogger lasts, or if there's some place Blogger blogs get downloaded to after it ends).

But I read something the other day that made me feel bad, but upon reflection this morning, I wonder if it was maybe a little bit of a bad take. Fundamentally, the author was writing about this time of enforced idleness (for many of us, and I admit I can only write from my own position, where I am privileged to stay home - my spring semester finishes up this week, I have no teaching this summer, so I am spending the summer reading ahead and also trying to plan for some kind of alternative labs for this fall just in case we wind up staying online - I have a fear we will, especially given what I suspect is the too-early opening of my state and the one to the south of us). They were noting about how this was like a chance to "pull back" and "look inward" and - I kid you not - "discover who you really are."

Um.

If this is showing me who I really am, it's not good. I'm easily-upset, and tiresome, and obsessively worried about dumb things (I keep checking King Arthur Flour and Bob's Red Mill in hopes of seeing flour come available to order again, and never see it, and then worry - will we really actually wind up starving?)

And I'm boring and kind of depressive and I cycle in my little ruts way too much. I am not a sparkling or interesting person, based on my pandemic persona. (My pandemsona? I mean, if this were a dystopian cartoon/tv show where people created their own OCs that lived in it). I am too much of a worrier and too prone to get locked in my own head.

I'm not the Disney Rapunzel, painting in her tower and reading books and plotting escape; I am more like some scared forest creature - maybe one of the rabbits in Robin Hood, when they were being taxed to death by bad King John - who is hiding out in her burrow and worrying about how to get enough food for her family, or concerned about what the future will look like, and will it ever be safe to venture out?

But then it occurred to me this morning: isn't this just the philosophical flip side of the pandemic productivity porn we've seen, where people talk about how if you don't come out of this having learned a new language, and mastered sourdough starters, and cleaned and decluttered your house, and taken up a new creative hobby, it's not that you never had time, it's that you really didn't want to.... and I admit that idea pushes some buttons for me because I said, months before all this, "I wonder if the reason I don't do more research isn't that I don't have time (because too busy teaching) but I'm just not able to, because I'm not clever enough to come up with good research plans"

But you know? There's another thing going on here. We're all operating under a pretty heavy cognitive load. Yes, still. I catch myself thinking "You should have adapted to this by now" but the thing is, there are constant new blows - the latest being the "there's apparently this Secret Internal Document saying the US is going to have to brace for 3000 deaths a day throughout the summer" and similar things. And ordinary tasks are still hard - getting groceries means either doing a complex order online and hoping they have what you have and then driving out there and waiting, or masking up and going to a store and being very cognizant of who else is there and how close they are. And there's no browsing or lingering - get in, grab your stuff, pay, scram.

And I think that does affect us. And I'm still dealing, I think, with some of the aftereffects of grief for my dad - I was starting to pop back in February, and then this happened, and now I find myself on occasion having my brain once again feed me the "oh hey, remember how your dad died last summer? Remember the last phone conversation you tried to have with him? Remember going up there and having to go to the funeral home with your mom and make some hard decisions because she couldn't at that point in time?" And I suppose it's because my brain doesn't have enough to distract it right now that that comes back up. But it comes up at unwanted times - the time I remember was when I was trying to practice piano.

And so maybe it's NOT the ideal time to look at ourselves and go "okay, so this is who I really am"

Maybe for some lucky few - who are perhaps more emotionally robust than I am - it is. Bully for them, then. But maybe for the rest of us, we're operating under a big cognitive load, and trying to process truly frightening news every day, and dealing with logistics that are harder for most of us than they usually are - and so this is our pandemic selves, and not our real selves?

maybe, maybe our real selves get to come back out after there's a vaccine? I remember I used to be more cheerful and resilient; maybe that's the real me and not this scared rabbit who worries about starving or getting infected when she has to run out to the store. I hope I get to experience being that bouncier me again some time soon.