Mornings are better

I think I need to restrict my paying attention to the news to the mornings.

I am okay when I am first up, after I've eaten and dressed and in between doing piano practice (I am hoping some day lessons will be possible again, maybe this summer).

But as the day wears on...yeah, not so much. But this is normal for me. If I am going to get sad or struggle with stuff, it will definitely be in the evening. I noticed this after losing my dad. Sometimes being perceptive of one's moods is good; many nights I've gone to bed weepy and just told myself, "You'll be better in the morning, just wait and see" and yes, I am.

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I also need to just take it one day by one day. I can stick at home for one day. Thinking about sticking at home with only limited trips out to the grocery and MAYBE my office (if things get worse I could see them even banning us from campus) for 180 days or more....not so much. But "just make it through today" I can do.

Huh. I wonder if this is kind of like 12-step recovery; I knew people doing that who talked about "just taking it one day at a time"

***

I will try to get out to the grocery again.....sometime. But since I've heard on the news that they're running short of a lot of things, probably better for me to 100% rely on what I have stored up and leave the stuff that's currently on the shelves/in the warehouses for the people who didn't stock up.

I might wait until next week. Or later, if I can manage. I have frozen green beans and lots of canned beets and jarred red cabbage and canned corn and canned tomatoes; I can still get nutrition if I don't have fresh-fresh food. (And I'm wondering - if I could mail order some packets of seed, I think I have some potting soil in the garage or I could even dig some out of my yard and grow a few flats of lettuce for myself. I forget how long lettuce takes but if I got hot I would probably have to grow it inside)

I could also see if Lehman's still has some of their Amish pickles; years ago people mostly ate picked vegetables through the winter and they mostly survived. And if nothing else? I have vitamin C tablets so I won't get scurvy.

And a story about my brother, and how in a small way I'm very proud of him, and this is just an example to me of him taking his faith seriously:

They didn't have a lot of fresh food on hand, so he ventured out to the grocery. One of my niece's favorite foods is fresh blueberries. When he got to the store, there were two containers of blueberries left.

He bought ONE. He told my mom that he wanted to leave the other one for another person who needed it.

For me, I suspect this is going to be a hard lesson in trusting. Trusting God or Providence or the universe or accepting that very little is actually under my control. Trusting that I have enough food on hand and that I can get more when the time comes to get more. Trusting that if someone I love gets sick, the will either recover or I will be capable of accepting their death.

I am not good at trusting. This is going to be a hard lesson for me.

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But yes. I am genuinely concerned about me developing something like agoraphobia over this thing, given how nervous I was after church DESPITE no one having even a sniffle and DESPITE the fact that we didn't hug or shake hands (Mike elbow-bumped me and I have to admit that is so much less satisfying than a hug)

I am trying to look for the small bits of hopeful news - that they've started vaccine trials, that experiments are ongoing on a drug cocktail that might slow down the virus' damage in people's bodies, that maybe MAYBE people will be smart and socially distance and we won't see it wind up being like Italy here. (Though also: someone was noting that Italy is the demographically-oldest nation in Europe, and very possibly the high death rate was partly a function of that).


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Maybe today's plan - I slept until 7 am, unusually late for me, and maybe I need to force myself to an early bedtime and a more-normal rise time - is to put on a dress instead of wearing pajama pants and an old t-shirt again, and plan on trying to finish the Tabula Recta top and think about cutting the next quilt top. Doing stuff will keep me happy. And I must, must, must not think what I was thinking last night that made me put the socks I was knitting on down - "Why even bother? You'll never leave the house again and you won't need things like hats and gloves and there's not really any point in doing ANYTHING now"

But yeah. I can tell I'm stressed. People have noted this is a form of mourning, we are mourning being able to freely go about our business. And I saw someone note that the reason all of us are having a hard time with the whole chipper "oh, you can finish that book now!" or "oh, you should clear out and reorganize all your junk drawers!" advice and instead do stuff like sit and stare at the wall or endlessly refresh Twitter is because we're all dealing with a tremendous cognitive load right now and YES. Yes, I totally see that. I have made several small dumb "distracted" mistakes in the past few days that are EXACTLY like the mistakes I made after my dad first died. Like: yesterday, I set up my little teapot with the loose tea I wanted in it, and got out my big tea mug and put a bit of Golden Syrup in the bottom, ready to accept the tea when it was made....and then very nearly poured the boiling water into the mug instead of into the teapot. Distracted mistake. It made me worry in the moment, but when I read that thing about cognitive load, I realized this was normal, it was normal for me, it is just like what I was doing while mourning my dad.

Honestly, we need to stop giving each other the chipper advice about how Newton invented the calculus when he was self-quarantining to avoid the plague and the like. (Newton was a very unusual intellect; most of us are not). Yes, doing things is good. But if those things are talking on the phone with friends or writing fanfiction or knitting socks or playing board games with your kids or making soup or doodling instead of coming up with some new paradigm, that's fine too.

I was thinking about how before the enormity* of this hit, I was thinking cheerily about "well now I can do all that knitting I've been wanting to do!" and "I can watch all the dvds I bought or got as gifts and never had time to!" or "I can really deep-clean my terribly messy house!" and almost none of that has happened: I have spent a lot of time online, or staring at walls, or wandering restlessly around my house.

And maybe that's okay. Maybe I don't have to be "productive" right now, I'm still freaked out and kind of sad and worried and wondering how this will shake out, maybe later, later while we are hearing news of vaccine tests ongoing and looking good, or waiting for them to ramp up vaccine production, or waiting out the summer where summer classes were cancelled at my university, then I'll feel more like knitting, because I'll have a date circled on the calendar when we can go back out into the world, and it's just a countdown, instead of merely a count.

(*and yes, I used that word right here: enormity doesn't just mean something big, it means something big AND BAD though normally the implication is of immorality, and this virus is actually amoral: it is not living, so while it is bad, it is not wicked).

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And one last thing, shared by someone on ITFF: there are people we can look towards about "how do we survive not being out in the world: letter from a cloistered nun. Maybe I do need to add on a little more devotional practice other than the little bit of daily reading I normally do, and my evening prayer (which of late has mostly been me thinking of all the people I care for -and I do mean ALL, even distant acquaintances get listed - and praying they will be kept safe and whole through this. I suppose I also need to pray for myself but I have always found doing specifically that hard.