Friday was a brutal day. I cried for two hours. I think I was borderline clinically depressed. Friday afternoon, I walked into the bathroom and saw the bee earrings the Boy gave me a smiled. The rest of my life and the world was going to hell-in-a-hand-basket, but at least I had a kind and generous son. I sent the Boy a text message thanking him for the bee earring, telling him they made me smile. He told me when he read my text he thought, "Oh honey, you are depressed." (I guess when I sent my kid off for two years of inpatient treatment for anxiety and depression, he learned to read the signs...)
Yeah. It was bad.
I called three friends to bemoan my existence and they listened patiently. I had dinner with Claire-Adele (who goes back to school Monday) and then I went to a recovery meeting via Zoom. There, everyone was depressed, too.
The thought in my mind during the meeting: Thank god it's not just me.
And then I started to feel better. Being depressed is weird because in part I felt crazy for feeling so sad, like why I am so sad over this relatively small shit? Am I nuts? (Nevermind earlier that day someone at my company told me that while I was valued, my job and my team were not relevant to the purpose and existence of the company.)
So why? Why was I so depressed, along with so many other people? Earlier in the week, one of my friends sent me this text which stuck me as so true..
A week after the holidays, the pandemic had its highest daily death toll ever in the US and in Seattle restaurants and everything are closed. Wednesday was unsettling, just like so many other days in 2020. We were supposed to be starting a clean, fresh slate for 2021 and then Confederate flags flown at storming of the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday suggested that some Americans are still fighting the Civil War.
Back to the pandemic. I read in the Wall Street Journal last spring that people will be going berserk after nine months of being locked up. We are now working on month ten. Maybe this is my time to crack. Are others cracking, too? One of the physician leaders at Seattle Children's Hospital just resigned over racism. My question isn't why did he resign after being called racist slurs, but why did he resign now? Does the isolation of being quarantined make us think "I can't take it anymore. I'm done." Was it easier to put up with unacceptable shit in a pre-pandemic world?
While I don't mind living alone, I do mind working alone. Some of the bumps and bruises that come with a day job are not smoothed and washed away by coffee, lunch and happy hour with co-workers, seeing each other's faces during meetings. Reading body language.
The same friend who sent me the above text said this as well: "No one is having fun." Like real fun. There were no baseball games or soccer matches to watch outside this summer, no football this fall. No Christmas or New Year's parties. No vacations are planned. As the Boy said, we are living in a "monotone purgatory."
So how did I get out of this rut this weekend? I called some friends. I hung out with Claire-Adele. I went for a walk with a friend around Meadowbrook Pond. I've lived in Seattle for sixteen years and this urban wetland preserve was a few miles from my house and I had never been there before. It was a delightful find. I listened to a great meditation on serendipity -- no one knows the wonderful surprises that tomorrow can bring.
And I am getting back to books. I am reading Enchanted April, a novel by Elizabeth von Armin written in 1922. Four English women leave their dreary lives behind and go to Italy for a month. I am a third of the way through and it is so much fun. So much fun. The best part is that is was published in 1922 -- four years after the 1918 Flu. Now that I have lived through my own pandemic, I look back at that period of time with a new found perspective and respect. While I can't go out and have my own adventure like that (yet), I can live vicariously and have my little escape through literature. And it isn't just escape--it is watching these woman transform, breaking out of their ruts, learning to love life.
What did I learn this weekend and from Enchanted April? Hope isn't going to come looking for me. I have to go out and find it.
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