Hi, I’m calling in from Santa Cruz, California. I am at my dad’s house. He set up a little quarantine room and bought me a mini fridge.
I got here three days ago and I’m in the room right now. I have a Murphy bed and my bag is half unpacked and I have a fully stocked mini fridge. So, I feel grateful for that. I came from New York, so that was really interesting and sort of heartbreaking to see the city in that state.
I think that I was in denial that things are not going back to normal for a while, until I decided to come back to California. And that’s when I really started to accept, I guess, that this is real and this is happening. And how has my life changed?
Well, I have to check what the day was today, cause I’ve completely lost track of the date. Time feels like very much a fiction right now. But also, I’m able to work on my own schedule, which is cool. And I’m working from home, which is also, it’s nice. And I have worn yoga pants every day for the last month.
But I think that although the flexibility and working from home is nice, this situation has made me get existential at certain times, feel really hopeful for humanity at other times, because it’s making me see how fragile our systems and structures that we rely on really are and how that can change any time. And those are things that, you know, you just take as given.
You just get up for work, hop on the subway, do your job, sit at your desk, talk with your office mates, eat lunch, blah, blah, blah. You’re just like stuck on the rat wheel. I guess that’s what this is, in a way kind of a blessing to step off the rat wheel. I’m lucky that I’m not sick and no one that I know around me is sick, but I digress.
I just, I’m realizing too how much the little things matter. And when you’re caught on the rat wheel, it’s kind of hard to see how much everything means to you. Like, for example, I have two office mates for my new job that I started six months ago and I didn’t even know that I can miss them cause I didn’t ever think about the fact that I care about them, even though I do. I don’t know them that well. But when I see their faces on their emails to me, I miss them and I feel a sense of love for them.
And it’s those little things, that are part of our everyday life, our everyday grind, that we stopped really seeing and appreciating, I guess. And it’s the same thing with everything else. Like fresh produce. Seeing my friends. And being able to go out and about in the world and share it with everyone else. And that sounds so simple, but when it’s taken away, you start to see how much everything means to you.
And I hope that when we come out of this, we can hold on to some of that, or at least I hope that I can hold on to some of that and remember how important everything is to me and how important all the little things are. Not overlook them as life goes on, because life is fragile and life is short and life is so beautiful and it’s so beautiful that we get to share it together. Oh, and the other thing is, I’ve been doing a lot more coloring books and singing.
I’ve been singing and I love singing. And I am so shy about singing, but now that I’m at my dad’s house, and I know that no one can hear me, I have just been belting it out and it feels so good! And I would never spend the time really with coloring books necessarily, or learning songs. I would try and distract me with other things. But now, I’m getting more into that.
And also, this whole situation is making me feel like, what the fuck do I have to lose? Why am I feeling shy about someone hearing my voice? Like, what? That’s, I don’t know, like, life is so short and so fragile, and why sweat the little things, you know, if it makes you feel good and you’re not hurting anyone then what’s the worry? And so that’s another thing I hope that I carry with me is a sense of freedom and expressing myself and having the space to kinda play around with that in a really safe space at my dad’s house, where I know that I will be accepted for whatever the fuck I do cause he wiped my ass a million times. And I’m lucky for that.
But anyways, yeah, playing around with that internal spaces and finding the things that make you feel alive and then hopefully I want to cultivate the confidence to share that with people and I don’t know why that is scary, but I guess like in everyday life, I guess it doesn’t matter. Yeah, and so that’s my experience with Covid thus far. Oh, and just feeling numb and not really knowing how to feel, because you can’t wrap your mind around it.
It just feels so incomprehensible and I don’t really know how to feel. And I think maybe I have projections about how this will change the world and I’m sure it’ll change me. I’m sure it’ll change a lot of people. But it’s hard to make sense of all that right now. And this is really cool that people can share their feelings about Covid and how it’s impacting them anonymously, because this is a safe space and I hope that maybe in general, we’ll come out of this closer than ever because we realize that we’re all the same and no matter where you come from, and of course there is like, you know, I mean, there’s so many factors into who gets the health treatment and who has access to hospitals and food deliveries and all that.
But nonetheless, the virus knows no borders and we’re all human, and we’re all subject to getting sick, we’re all going to die. So how can we come together and share this beautiful experience while we can? That’s my hope, something like that will come out of this. We’ll see some sort of unity and all of it. Yeah. But we’ll see. The uncertainty is uncertain. Okay. Well thanks, bye.