Living Through History, Part III

Today was much better. Much, much better.

I still feel a little fragile around the edges, of course. Things are just making me sad, even though I know this isn't forever. It's going to be a LONG time, but it won't be forever.

I spent the afternoon at my parents' house. It makes me uneasy, a little, to think that I could still be a silent carrier, but they told me last night, after I assume my daddy read this blog and a few of my FB comments, that if I didn't come there, they were coming here. They were -- rightly -- worried about my state of mind, and so was I. My mom and I played games and worked part of a puzzle, and watched King Ralph, and went for a walk around their neighborhood, and ate my mom's homemade rocky road ice cream. Dad just watched shitty TV... (love you daddy!) (How did that weird Mel Gibson movie end?)

And our new dishwasher was installed this morning! It's been almost a YEAR since our other one crapped out completely on us, and though Jack is amazing and washes pretty much 90% of the dishes, it also doesn't get done daily and though it doesn't bother me to have dishes in the sink (I know, I'm a heathen, whatever... I blame cohabitating in college with someone who used a new bowl for every bowl of cereal, even if eaten in succession, so after a night up studying for prelims, the sink would have like eight bowls in it. I learned to ignore it.) (I'm also just a slob. I can claim it). Anyway. But Jack takes F O R E V E R to wash dishes (he's just slow and distractible) and though I'm pretty fast at it, it's hard on my eczema even with gloves, and now with my back situation, it's kind of a weird angle and I inevitably get a weird back cramp. A new dishwasher is going to be heaven. HEAVEN.  We splurged a bit and got a pretty nice LG one, with a third rack and a steam option (not sure what that's about yet but HEY) and I'm super stoked that this finally happened.

So tonight, I'm going to bed in better spirits than last night, but also just ... the rate at which everything shifts is almost incomprehensible to me. Oh, and the best news of the day is that Jack is pretty sure tomorrow will be the last day he's required to physically be at work and he can start being home to work and my anxiety will be cut in HALF if that happens. Evidently, there are people working in his office that don't even think this shit is real and I just ... it makes me fearful every day that he's going to track it into our house.  One more day. Just one more day and he'll be working from home.  And thank the Universe that he's properly employed and not still counting on Uber for his livelihood because holy shit what a scary thing to think about.

Living Through History, Part II

I'm not even going to sugarcoat it.

Today was spectacularly hard for me.

I didn't sleep well last night -- maybe just under three hours of sleep total, and we went to bed reasonably early? I think? But there I was just... staring at the TV, "aggressively awake" as I told Jack at about 3:00 am once I had given up entirely and was researching what I was feeling.  Because I was feeling strange.

I've had a bit of a ... journey ... since Halloween (that's not important other than I know it was the day that kicked all of this off because it was the day I almost lost consciousness during first period APEL) to sort out what's going haywire in my body.  There have been three or four office visits (only one with my new primary care) and a CT scan of my head on Thanksgiving, and so on and so forth.  So far, I have no answers, and with the state of medicine being what it is, my problems are obviously small potatoes in comparison.  But my hormones, and then by extension my blood sugar, have gone a bit haywire -- due likely to stress and my underlying PCOS becoming more of an issue as I get older and my hormones just naturally change -- and I think I felt a lot of that today.

Today was probably the single biggest shift I've ever felt in my hormones all at once, ever.  Perhaps I don't typically notice it because I'm at school during the week when it would, cycle-wise, happen, or because typically civilization isn't collapsing around us when I'm entering this delicate monthly lady phase.  But man oh man, today has been emotionally really hard.  There has been lots of crying. Lots. And lots. Just in waves.  I tried a lot of my go-tos for distraction, but I felt SO distracted and antsy that I couldn't really do some of my go-tos, like cross stitching or reading or video game playing.  I tried watching When Harry Met Sally (mostly to see if I could nap) and then I put on Anne of Green Gables (another go-to movie when I'm blue) but those didn't really suck me out of it.  And the lingering weirdness of my body has haunted me all day.  Maybe I should just give it a name, like I did my dizziness friend. Her name is Patty. Patricia when I'm REALLY dizzy.  That came back all at once on the couch last night, and I have mostly already linked that to hormones. So it wouldn't be surprising that this new weird thing -- these weird tingly/shivery phases -- is, too.  (And I learned today that the period flu is a thing.  Who knew?) (Bodies are weird.) (And dumb.)

So that was my day: being distracted and freaked out about the new way my body has found to engage in treachery; being exhausted from lack of quality sleep; and continuing to be generally unhinged when I let my brain go too slack and start to think about the hows and ifs and whens of all of this.

But I vowed before I opened my laptop to write this -- which I didn't want to do because I was finally emotionally a little settled -- that I would end with some positives. Let's see if I can make it to ten.

One: we're having a new dishwasher installed tomorrow!  It might not be the absolute most responsible thing we could do in this moment, having work people in our house, but our logic is that we paid a pretty penny for it, and it needs to get installed, and if one of us does get really, really sick, it's going to be a pretty important piece of the sanitization battle.  My plan is to make sure everything is clean when they get here, let them in and run away, and then wipe every thing down again in the kitchen when they leave.

Two: I took a candlelit hot shower just now and it definitely improved my mood. I cried a bit in the shower again, but overall, it was a net gain in emotional boost.

Three: I'm enjoying the daily prompt posting and I am loving how many different people from all different aspects of my life are connecting.

Four: Bless Jack.  Poor thing came home to me as an absolute wreck, but he snuggled into bed with me and just held me.  And then we feasted on leftovers.

Five: I'm reading Jane Eyre one chapter at a time aloud and posting it to my APEL classroom. I have no idea if anyone cares, but it's helping me have some structure to my day.

Six: Buying a Switch for myself for Christmas definitely felt a bit selfish at the time, but I'm thankful I did it because it is providing a pretty solid distraction when I need it.

Seven: Thankful that I invested in a weighted blanket. Spent a LOT of time under it today.

Eight: Thankful for streaming services that make it so that I never have to actually get up to watch a movie of my choice. Heh.

Nine: Thankful for all of my friends -- Summer, Bonnie, Erica, Sarah, Kaitie, Kim, Satin -- who provide a constant stream of conversation and distraction.  Especially Summer, who keeps me sane by keeping it real and helping me talk through everything.

Ten: My little neighborhood that enables me to safely and easily get a mile or so in each day simply by walking in circles. I managed to get a walk in between bouts of rain and while I don't think it did as much good as I hoped it would do in the moment, I'm hoping tonight it'll help me sleep a bit. We'll see.

Living Through History, Part I

It's been almost seven years since I posted anything to this blog, but now feels as good a time as any to document my experiences as a teacher, because we're living through unprecedented and scary times, and as witnesses with access to documentation abilities, why not? So. Here goes. 

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I cried in the shower tonight. 

I was doing okay for most of the day today; better than the previous couple of days, with this huge looming existential thing approaching in the distance of all of our lives. I kept myself productive today.  I did school things, I did house things, I did self things. I mostly stayed distracted. 

But in the shower tonight, by candlelight and spa music from Pandora, I let my brain and my thoughts go a little too soft; too slippery; too scary.  The thing that got me this time?*** The thought of actual quarantine, as opposed to social distancing.  What if one of us gets this? Jack is all I have right now for actual human contact, and the thought of losing that one and only human I'll likely be able to touch and snuggle with and watch TV with and talk to in person for the foreseeable next months just slipped in there and devastated me.  Again, here, typing it out, it's scary.  And I know it wouldn't be forever, but the prospect of it kicked me in the gut just now and so I'm going to wallow a little in the Not Okay.  I did a good job today avoiding that dark part of my brain, and in a few minutes, I'll snuggle down into bed with my Switch and spend my last minutes of wakefulness tonight playing Breath of the Wild.  But at this moment, I'm going to let the tears run down my cheek thinking about all that's yet to come with this pandemic thundering through our lives. 

*** Yesterday, it was All Of It. It all caught up to me.  But the tipping point was thinking about the possibility of not spending any more time with my Speech and Debate seniors. And this crushes me. Absolutely, wholly, and completely. Day before, it was an episode of The Nanny.  At the end of the episode, Maxwell shares a video tape with the children with footage of their deceased mom.  And I thought about losing my own mom to this virus and absolutely lost it. 

I'm sure I'm not alone.  Actually, I know I'm not alone.  I'm talking to friends every day, and it sounds like we all just rise and fall throughout the day like the lazy waves at a low surf day in the ocean Some minutes, hours, you're up, buoyed by your eighth episode of Top Chef that day, or by your tiny child's drawings, or by the second piece of leftover birthday cake you've eaten day (... two of those might be me...), and some minutes, hours, you're down, sinking into despair wondering whether life ever goes back to normal; wondering how this all ends; wondering when I can have dinner at my parents' again without the paralyzing fear of infecting them with something that could kill them. 

This was maybe a bad idea to try to write these thoughts down because now I'm a mess. But it doesn't do any good to pretend like everything is fine.  Humans aren't built for isolation.  I'm as isolated as it gets; I don't mind being home for days at a time and spend my summers just as happily on my couch watching reruns of TV as I do in the winter.  That's by choice, though. This doesn't feel like it is. That's going to be the hardest part of all of this, and probably why people are ignoring advice and directives to avoid each other: because it's terribly, objectively, wrenchingly hard to voluntarily commit to isolation. 

I hope everyone else out there is doing what they can to maintain some semblance of normal. I was sort of hoping writing stuff down would be helpful; that remains to be seen, as I sit here in my ugly-cry finest, wondering what the hell I was thinking. 

That's the thing about living through history, though. It isn't always going to be pretty.  It's not all ticker tape parades and celebratory fireworks. Sometimes it's death and destruction and grief and fear; that's where we're at right now.  I just hope when we come out the other side, things change. They have to.  Otherwise, thousands of people will have died from this for no reason.  Entire lives were upended for nothing. People lost jobs for nothing; people figured out overnight how to do their jobs online for nothing; but most of all, again, people will have died for nothing.