What have you lost while staying inside?

[petra]

A commiseration post for today. Feel free to skip it if you're not in the mood for negativity.

Having to stay inside means we're all losing things we once had, or could have had. What have you lost to the forces that make you stay inside? How do you deal with the grief surrounding those losses?

Comments

[petra]

Most recently, I have lost my job to COVID-19, as well as my chorus and my dance team. They will all come back again when things go back to normal, but these are losses I've sustained before when I was disabled by illness. Losing them again means I've lost a lot of the direction in my life and the differentiation of my days. I keep reading guidance on how to maintain focus without the external forces that used to govern my weeks, but it's been hard to implement any of the advice.

I don't really know how to cope with these losses yet; on some level I feel like I'm just waiting for normality to reassert itself, rather than facing the new normal of mostly-empty days and not seeing people. I didn't pose today's question as an expert, but rather as a fellow traveler, trying to find my way through the maze of new experiences. I've lost what I've lost this time through no fault of my own, and I didn't even have the choice to keep doing things while I was deeply impaired, as I did last time I lost parts of my life.

If anyone has some hard-won wisdom on this subject, I would be grateful for it.

[desireearmfeldt]

Would you find it helpful to have one on one more sustained interactions with friends? I personally find I cannot live by social media chat alone (ever).

[petra]

I think that would be helpful, yes, but the more serious problem is that I can't get my butt out of bed and stay awake. I don't have any obligations, and my body and brain seem to have taken this lack of external requirement as a reason to sleep more than 12 hours a night. If I have to be up and doing things, I can, but the second the obligation goes away, the urge to sleep comes back. It's extremely frustrating.

[desireearmfeldt]

I often find when I'm in depressed/don't-wanna mode that social obligations I have to show up to can motivate me to get moving, and that interactivity can get me operating normally (while I'm actually doing it, at least).

My brain is not your brain, of course!

[petra]

That seems like a reasonable thing to expect of oneself. I need a standing coffee date at 8:15 or so to get me started, which seems like a lot to ask of my friends when they're all dealing with this pandemic in their own ways.

[desireearmfeldt]

The trick is to find someone who also needs a kick out of bed. :)

(Myself, I'm trying to start work promptly in the morning rather than getting in the habit of frittering away what would otherwise have been my commute time.)

[petra]

I feel pretty strongly that commute time is allowed to be your time, but then I'm not working, just fritterin'.

[desireearmfeldt]

True. But morning is my brain time, so if I can start early and end early, I'm likely to be more productive.