It’s been a difficult year. For you, for me, for everybody.
It’s one thing to acknowledge that. We all do, usually in a flippant sort of way. Oh, it’s just more of 2020, we say. Everything is crazy now. That part is true, but it’s a surface truth. Things are crazy right now, but what does that really mean?
I’m the sort of person who you would expect would handle a lockdown pretty well: I’m an introvert, a reader and a writer who makes a day living in a field where he can do his job remotely. I don’t socialize widely, I’m not a party- or bar-goer. I’m just the sort who should be able to survive a lockdown without much trouble.
That’s what I thought.
But that is not what happened. I’ve found myself struggling to stay focused. This isn’t from time to time, either, this is all day every day. I’ve never been someone who needs a lot of social interaction, but the complete lack of connection to anyone outside my immediate family has had a sort of wearing effect on me. I suspect this is true of a large number of people, but I’m not meeting them and talking with them.
Whether we like to admit it or not, we are all social animals. One of the reasons we consider prison (and even more so, solitary confinement) a punishment is precisely because of the social isolation. We employ it as punishment and control for children – that’s what time out is. Isolation for a short time.
I think that no matter where you are on the introversion/extraversion scale, prolonged isolation isn’t good for you. As much as I had fantasies of being alone at stressful times in my life, it isn’t good for me, either.
When the lockdowns started, I got back over an hour a day. I polluted less. I spent less. After the stress of the change, the first couple of months felt freeing – I was able to do my job without leaving my house. I was one of the truly fortunate ones.
But about six months in, I found that I was having real trouble making use of that extra time. I couldn’t get things done. I was in the middle of writing a book – I’d go days where I dithered and only wrote a few words a day. I had periods where I didn’t write anything at all, and other periods where I rewrote, then rewrote again. It wasn’t only that, either. I wasn’t getting things done around my house. Things that I used to take joy in seemed flat and uninteresting.
I realized that I was depressed.
I have battled depression at times in my life. I was a depressed teenager. I went through a significant depression in my twenties that I worked through and ultimately defeated. Since then, I have been able to head it off when I feel it coming on, using techniques I learned in counselling more than thirty years ago. I also suffer from seasonal depression – it was only a few years ago that I recognized this. Now I use a high intensity light for thirty minutes most mornings between October and March, and it definitely helps.
This time it has been a bit different. I think everybody is depressed, or at least more depressed than they were a year ago. You can’t talk to a counsellor face-to-face. I don’t know about you, but for me, teleconferencing is useful, but it doesn’t take the place of actual human interaction.
I miss people’s faces. I miss smiles. I miss cooking for friends.
I decided that what worked thirty-plus years ago wasn’t working for me this time around. I started investigating things that I could do to help myself. I landed on headspace. I realize that this isn’t for everybody, but it has been working for me. Daily meditation has helped me calm jackrabbit thoughts. I am less anxious. And now, two weeks in, I can feel focus starting to return.