Hi, I guess, I’m from New York, which is super fun, right? If you’ve been paying attention to the news, it’s fantastic living here right now. Pretty much every day, it felt terrible. I’m from here originally and I’ve lived here my whole life. And I’ve lived through all the pretty intense situations that the city has had to go through. 9/11, financial crisis. It’s a lot, living here, but it’s great at the same time. When it’s great, it’s really great. And when it’s not great, it’s pretty, pretty terrible, right? It’s like a weird, abusive relationship.
I live by myself right now. My roommate went to go stay with her boyfriend in another state, and I don’t live with my boyfriend, so it’s just me here. And I’ll talk out loud to myself as if someone else was here. I’m responsible for literally everything, you know, cooking, cleaning, waking up, functioning like a person.
I fall asleep at probably four in the morning now. I used to wake up at 6:00 am for work. Now I’m going to sleep when I’m normally getting ready to start my day, and that is my new normal. I have this weird sleep cycle and I wake up at nine. I’ll lay there for maybe two hours.
And every day I will cry for maybe 10 minutes. I will set a timer for two minutes and cry. So I don’t spend the entire day crying. I’ve been lucky enough to not lose anybody in any of this, to somehow be spared from the experience of this virus so directly in my life, but I do have a friend who is a nurse, and I work for a medical institution. So I can’t really escape it. It’s just there all the time. So sometimes I just cry, because I think about people who are really going through a lot and are really suffering and how maybe the new normal isn’t going to be so normal.
And I’m worried that this is never going to end. Even though factually that doesn’t happen that way, it just feels like that. And I’m hoping it ends really soon, so I can stop feeling the sense of dread every single day. It’s kind of hard.
But sometimes it’s not. Sometimes I will play music and dance around, and I’m okay for maybe half of the day and I’ll cry for the rest of it. So I guess like everything else, nothing really makes sense. And there’s no real normal in any of this. And finding a normal in this has been complicated and anxiety inducing, and sometimes I just wish this was a really bad dream and I’ll wake up and none of it happened. Right? I’m sure I’m not the only person that feels like that.
Anyway, it is 2:30 in the morning and, yeah, I’m going to go be awake for another two hours and wait for the birds to tell me to go to sleep.