Self-Awareness Overload by Gillian Barnes (@geezfresh)

I can’t believe the close of another round of #GBWritesWithOthers is upon us and now it's my turn to share why I've learned. It's hard to pick just one subject as I feel like this period of time has been one of constant pivoting, but I would say (and yes, it is an umbrella term) I have learned the most about self-awareness.

Being alone with yourself is hard. I mean, in my case I live with a partner, so I haven't been fully alone like some people (side note: you are warriors!), but for many more hours than is typical I have been "alone with my brain."

I can't plan everything. Damn.

I write about this a lot, so I apologize for the re-hash, but it is sort of necessary to explain my next point. I'm a strategist. I plan everything. Guess what can't happen during a pandemic? Planning. During this time my first response was to plan, backup plan, and triple backup plan. Planning calms me, but the fact is, most of that planning was for naught.

However, despite my initial disappointment in finding this out (and all-out depression some days), I have learned that I can think about different situations without committing. I can run numbers and dream without execution. This has been valuable to me as I now know how to roll with it (as much as my personality will allow) much better than I have in the past.

Self-care is hard.

The first few months of quarantine left me confused. I lacked a routine. I wanted to sleep in like a slug, and I let myself do that. Now let me tell you, that was the first mistake. Pre-pandemic, as I have never been a morning person, I would wake myself up 1-2 hours early to get ready. No, I'm not a prima donna with my makeup etc., what I mean is that I need time to mentally awaken. It takes me several cups of coffee, a shower, and really, just time to be my best. In the beginning, I let that slip. Don't get me wrong, I still got things done, but I didn't feel good about them.

I also bit my nails to an absurd degree, indulged in extra calories, and really just lived a very sumptuous life. As punishment, I put on some extra weight, lost a significant amount of energy, and withdrew from many things that made me happy. It was a bad scene.

Recently, I started changing that. I started nightly tea drinking to calm my body and mind. I began painting my nails so that I couldn't bite them as easily (truly gross habit...but that's me!). I got into playing story and planning-based games to calm myself (Stardew Valley). And finally, I started this project back up to force myself to reengage with the writing community on Twitter and beyond.

I still have more work to do. For example, at some point I have to get into a consistent workout schedule, but I am now in a much healthier place where I am prioritizing what makes me happy and calm.

I have two selves, and they need to blend better. No more 50/50 split.

We all have different character traits, but during these past few months I've realized I have two distinct personalities. The first is the CEO and that woman runs things. She gets sh*t done. She knows what's best and won't hear anything else. She's kind of awful sometimes and she has not been thriving during quarantine.

The second is a sort of homebody. She enjoys freshly washed laundry. She likes reading books and having multiple hour philosophical conversations. She dreams about traveling and appreciates beauty. Someday, she might buy a house in Maine or Kyoto and never come back. She writes when inspiration strikes and when she is obligated to. She cares about her family and friends above all else. This latter person is who I am becoming, with a dash of the former.

My goals and intensity have netted me promotions and other accolades, but they have also made me unhappy. I have realized that I can still maintain a bit of the CEO while relaxing. It's okay. I like that. I am going to strive to be an 80/20 person from here on out with the calmer Gillian running things and the CEO in check. She's still valuable, but sometimes ambition needs to take a backseat to mental health.

I ask too much of people.

I don't think it's a secret that sometimes I hold people up to the standards I set for myself (which are quite high, and sometimes ridiculous). I've stopped doing that as much. In one particular instance, and for anonymity I will keep this as blanket as possible, I learned about someone's home life and it changed how I look at how they achieve things. People are genuinely trying their best and they all have different levels of achievement etc. I am really trying to see people more fully now (I can't promise I will uphold this 24/7, but I am TRYING).

I want what my parents have.

Oh, dear. This isn't the first time I've written about my stepmother being correct, and trust me, it won't be the last. In the past, she and father mentioned leaving me my childhood home. It made sense as I am an only child, but I remember distinctly firing back with "well, I'm just going to sell it. There's no way I will live in New Hampshire." I believe I even made an ICK noise.

That girl was CRAZY! These days I've found myself dreaming of inheriting or purchasing that home. It's a place of possibilities. I see my husband and I raising children of our own there, eventually finishing the basement and making an art studio in it, or even planting a full-blown garden...I think I only see it now because I've had time to sit with my priorities and realize what they need to be as opposed to what I thought they should be. I'm officially old, nostalgic, and focused on going gray happily at the age of 33. What is happening?

The new Gillian

When we emerge from this time, I think we will all be different, and that certainly isn’t a bad thing. I will still be career-focused, but I will tamper that with a deep respect for others. Here’s to 2021 because 2020 is almost in the rearview mirror.

Pandemic Parenting by Michelle Peterson

Towels need to be washed.

Of course, the wet towel is on the floor again.

Do I bother to go get him to pick it up this time? I don’t feel like it, I’ll just hang it. Ugh, the bathroom.

I should wash the dishes first.

Coffee.

“MOM I CAN’T FIND THE ANSWER TO NUMBER NINE!”

Coffee.

Zoom meeting at 3:15.

I should set an alarm. So we aren’t late.

“Jamie, get down please.”

I still need to scan yesterday’s assignments. And email them.

Maybe naptime.

“Jamie, get down.”

He’s so bored.

Email advisor by Monday.

I need to finish going through the edits first. Maybe Saturday.

Where is the other sock that was just in my hand?

“Mom?”

Coffee.

During the 2020 Coronavirus pandemic, I was unemployed at home with two children, while my partner was an essential worker and continued working full time. The last four months have been incredibly difficult. I thought I was so prepared in the beginning, equipped for the schools’ closings with my whiteboard and daily schedule. I envisioned my second grader working diligently at his corner desk, ready with posters and supplies, while I flipped through board books with my toddler, sprawled across the carpet.

I should mention that I was also in school. In my final semester of graduate school, working on a thesis about invisible labor and motherhood. My thesis certainly got laid on the back-burner as the labor in my household multiplied intensely. Oh, the irony.

It is not as if I hadn’t been home with my kids before, obviously. I already spent weekdays with my toddler while my eldest was at school. Although it wasn’t much, at least then I could rely on nap time for a small window of productivity. Again, I had a dissertation to write. We had a routine that got completely swallowed by the second-grade curriculum as soon as schools closed, and my older son joined us for full days. It was no longer a simple day with the kids, as it was before. There were immense amounts of schoolwork to be done (mine and my son’s), deadlines to follow, and normalcy to attempt to uphold. My role was almost as an interpreter, exchanging, and relaying messages between my son and his teacher. He is not old enough to manage the technology required on his own. I became the hand at the mouse, the curator of the day’s assignments, the coveter of correct answers. I used to call this ‘homeschooling’—as many people do. I try not to call it that anymore. It is not homeschooling. It is social distance learning and it is a ship that nobody is really sure how to navigate. I do not dictate the curriculum or the due dates, the way a true homeschooling parent would. And I’m not ashamed to admit that sometimes, I was just as confused as my son was. I often wondered about people that had, could you imagine it, four kids. Five even.

Meanwhile, my tiny tornado of toddler was so stir-crazy, he was quite literally bouncing off the walls. He managed a few injuries during our time shut-in, the worst of which warranted a trip to the emergency room after a bad face-first fall slammed his bottom teeth right through his lip.

The novelty of doing schoolwork at home wore off quickly with my second grader, understandably. He is eight and this is not what he is used to either. I am not his teacher, I’m Mom. No matter how much I try to mimic his classroom with a child-sized desk, bright posters, colorful maps, and bins of school supplies—there is no doubt that his mind has separated the two. This is home and there is a hollering toddler in the background and distractions in every room.

It felt as if the chaos inside my household paralleled the chaos existing outside of it. Through the first few months of the pandemic it felt irresponsible to not watch the news daily (which I would later adjust for the sake of my sanity). The NH.gov/covid webpage became the most visited site on my browser as I checked the death toll daily. In retrospect, I don’t know why I put myself through such torture. Stories from trembling masked healthcare workers and news reports of people dying over FaceTime calls with family would haunt me for days on end. Sometimes I would hide tears from my children behind the closed bathroom door.

At one point I noticed pains in my chest. I worried I had contracted the virus and found myself frantically Googling (of course) symptoms. I checked my temperature constantly through the day and it consistently turned up normal. Still, the pains in my chest were driving me mad. The awareness of this foreign feeling in my chest hijacked my train of thought. It was always on my mind. This went on for about three weeks. My mother came to drop off a care package for us one day and I said to her in distress, “This feeling in my chest is driving me crazy. It almost feels like I just went on a run, but I didn’t just go on a run.” I didn’t know how else to describe it. “It sounds like anxiety.” She informed me. The anxiety had gotten so bad that its physical manifestation caused me to have more anxiety about my anxiety.

Snack cup.

Where is the snack cup?

This is why we have ants.

I should include a section of my thesis about how much time mothers spend looking for things. Kidding.

Maybe not.

“Mom I don’t know what this word means.”

Ignore him.

Make him walk down the hallway to you this time.

“MOM?!”

Ok.

“Let’s go check on your brother.”

“Mum?”

“MUUUMMMAAAAA!”

Fine, I’ll carry you.

Coffee.

Is five cups too many?

8:30 pm Zoom meeting.

I’ll never make it.

I felt not only caged in but as if my identity had evaporated. I longed to return to a job I wasn’t fond of for the sake of adult interaction. The perpetual task load, the nonstop emotional labor, the battle with fragility in the face of an existential crisis, and constant fear of the unknown took an emotional toll. I would see memes on social media mocking parents with “How hard is it to hang out with your own kids?” I’d want to scream, “The person who wrote this can’t possibly have children!” Which isn’t necessarily true. I just want to hear that this person pandemic parented through 86 days in isolation while navigating social distance learning before making such a comment.

With the heat of summer came the re-openings. We could finally spend a lot more time outside, now that the rainy days of spring have passed. School for my son had come to an end, and after too many sleepless nights and mental breakdowns, I completed my thesis and finished school as well. It felt as if we came through to some other side. As the weeks of summer passed, I realized how much mental load had been lifted. Each morning I woke up I felt more refreshed than the day before. I learned to limit my media intake. I learned that next time, it’s ok to let the dishes sit dirty in the sink during a school day, and an hour-long TV break to chill your nerves isn’t going to turn your kid’s brains to complete mush. I have learned not to try to mimic his school day and play the teacher role. Just be Mom. I wish I hadn’t put so much pressure on myself. There is still anxiety that exists, but with each day the ‘new normal’ becomes, well, more normal.

As hard as the last five months have been, there has been tremendous growth. That is the silver lining. It almost feels as if I’ve been on some hero’s quest, and I’ve returned with new perceptions. I’ve learned so much about myself during this period of strictly staying at home. As humans we are constantly growing and changing. The last five months felt like an accelerated, intensive transformation program. What has changed? Too much to list in a blog post. But I feel confident saying that for the first time ever, I literally feel like a new person.

Candid 35 mm photograph of my toddler and I taken by my eight-year-old with a disposable camera during the 2020 Coronavirus pandemic.

If you enjoyed this piece, please check out Michelle Peterson on Instagram @miche_nicole or at mpetersonart.com.

Creation During Catastrophe: What I've Learned During Quarantine by Chris Santoro (@santorodesign1)

I imagine there are plenty of people out there reading this, who can’t even remember this past New Year’s Eve. With how this year has gone, it feels like memories of “normal” life become more distant. While I have moments like that myself, I still remember New Year’s Eve 2019 like it was yesterday.

My girlfriend and I went out for dinner at Les Zygomates in Downtown Boston. Over drinks and dinner, we talked about how 2019 was a year of change for both of us. We’d seen each other go through our fair share of struggles and come out better, stronger than before. We saw growth in each other, and we were proud of our accomplishments. Ultimately, we were extremely optimistic about what 2020 would bring us. What more could we accomplish? What more could we discover about ourselves? We talked about traveling during the summer, finally giving ourselves a long-deserved break from our respective work obligations and a ton of built-up stress along the way. For me, I had goals related to my design studio, Santoro Design. I wanted to launch the new website early in the year, begin to get more of the projects I wanted, and eventually land an office space within a co-working space or other building.

Our hopes were up. 2020 was going to be ours. Then, all of a sudden, it wasn’t. 

By early March, COVID-19 had hit my home of Boston, MA, and it was only the beginning. Around that time, I ended up moving in with my girlfriend down in Providence, RI; escaping the initial cases building up. We watched as businesses we loved began to shut down for the foreseeable future. Restaurants we enjoyed were struggling to keep up, some of them even closed for good. I had to give up the co-working space membership I’d just gotten back in Boston since it was clear I wouldn’t be using it. Our days turned into these amorphous stretches of time. Hours blended in together. Work during the day couldn’t have been more stressful. At that point, I had to not only worry about getting enough work to sustain me, but I also had to be concerned about how I was going to do it all and not lose my mind. I knew that given the state of everything, signing on for unemployment was not going to be an option. The beginning of quarantine was a total and complete nightmare.

Here we are, in the middle of August. As I write this, I acknowledge that I’ve been extremely lucky and privileged to have thrived during this catastrophe. Not only did work never slow down, but it was the best work I’ve done in my entire career; some projects are still on-going. To say that I’m thankful for every single client and connection of mine, who made this reality possible, would be an understatement. I’m also thankful for my girlfriend, my friends, and my family who have supported me during this time. I shudder to think about how I would have fared, or where I’d be right now if it weren’t for any of them. It’s safe to say that I’ve somewhat adapted more to the “new norm,” even though it’s still uncomfortable to wake up to. While I have nothing concrete to attribute to this adaptation, I will say that life in quarantine has been helpful in reinforcing certain lessons that have brought me to this point, and will carry me further.

Allow Space For Unproductive and Negative Emotions

There’s no getting around this: life and work during quarantine have been a fight with the darkest parts of myself: the parts that just wanted to lay in bed, numb and mentally exhausted; the parts that wanted to just procrastinate that task for a little longer; the parts that brought up thoughts of, “What’s the point of any of this?” For those of us able to work from home while constantly feeling the weight of every headline and statistic, it’s been crushing blow after crushing blow to our mental health and our productivity. Contrary to popular belief, no amount of goal-setting or productivity exercises can stifle the feelings of grief, depression, and even anger. There’s no amount of telling our minds to “stop it” or “shut up” when it comes to these feelings of what we’ve all been experiencing: crisis exhaustion. 

The only way we can push through is facing these feelings head-on. We need to give them space to exist and to speak. We need to give ourselves moments to not be okay or unproductive, even meditate on them. When we give them space, we process our feelings and make it easier for ourselves to push forward. In these desperate times, and other times after this, we need to prioritize well-being over productivity, because our well-being will ultimately determine how productive we can be.

Prioritize Yourself Via Your Schedule 

As a creative professional diagnosed with ADD, working from home has been a struggle. Essentially, I was continuously running on fumes. My work got done, my clients were happy, and my studio got paid, but my general well-being was burnt out in ways I’d never felt before. I put myself on the back burner, and I felt it every day.

Since then, I’ve tried to get back to some semblance of my working hours. I have a quiet start to my mornings, work from 9 AM to 5 PM with an hour-long lunch, work out, and then make dinner. I hardly ever take calls in the morning, and I try to keep late nights to a minimum. By doing this, I’ve made efforts to try and reclaim some normalcy. Being a designer requires me to be at my best, so I can make the clearest decisions for the projects I work on, and my clients’ best interests. I know that being self-employed gives me this inherent advantage, but I also believe that these are uncertain times that require us to prioritize ourselves in whichever way possible. At the very least, we should try and reserve one hour of our day to go outside for a walk. Especially for careers in design and tech, there’s nothing more beneficial than separating from our screens and taking a break.

Limit the News Intake

2020 has had no shortage of terrible news. Since the beginning of this year, it feels like the bad news hasn’t stopped once. Especially with our phones, we’ve become a society held hostage to every notification bump, alert, and alarming tweet. This has not only contributed to my own sense of crisis exhaustion but also many of my colleagues and other people. It’s even more difficult to completely disconnect from the news as well because everything that’s been going on has been extremely important; from COVID-19 to racial justice, and our political unrest.

Whether people decide to stop or not stop news intake is up to preference. Personally, I feel like 2020 couldn’t be a more pivotal year for our country, so to stop watching or reading the news is not possible for me. However, I have been making efforts to limit the amount of news I take in during the day. I usually leave it for later in the evening or during the morning before working hours. I’ll get notifications during the day, but unless it’s extremely important I won’t click on them. If I find myself going down a rabbit hole of news overload, I try to snap myself out of it and get back to the task at hand.

We’ve Got a Long Way To Go…

The cold, hard truth is that until we get a vaccine, COVID-19 isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. However, we can at least still try and retain some balance and normalcy to our lives by prioritizing our self-care. At this point, we can’t afford to be anything but realistic about our limitations, our health, and our well-being. As long as we take care of ourselves, we’ll continue to be in better shape to stay productive. The most important thing I’ve tried to remember is that we are all learning and working through this experience together. We can only continue to be patient and caring towards ourselves, and each other.

If you enjoyed this piece, please follow Chris Santoro on Twitter @santorodesign1. 

Canceled Plans, Breakdowns, and Empty Cheeto Bags: How My Life in Quarantine was an Exercise in Gratitude by Emma Vale (@EmmaValeWrites)

A global pandemic couldn’t have arrived at a worse time.  

In the first half of the year alone, I’d had five different travel plans, two different sets of relatives were supposed to come into town, and I’d found a way to squeeze in a writing workshop.

Everything had its own neat little box. I’d found the money to pay for all the trips and hotels needed. This year, I would be literally globetrotting.

Until this blasted virus came along.

Panic quite clearly settled not only into the media, but into every business, into every home.

Yet, in my household, there was no scrubbing of every surface. There was no hourly-ritual hand sanitization. There was no real worry at all.  

This year I was to be a globetrotter, and in January, I’d taken my first trip. A ski trip to Bavaria, around the time the first cases were breaking in Germany. The first case was in fact, a piddling 10 miles away from the resort my family and I were staying at. It wasn’t widely known at the time. This obviously ended as well as you might think.

So, my mother started sneezing. Then she was quite quickly frightfully cold. Then came the cough. My mother’s cough shook the house. The coughing quite literally broke one of her ribs. Yes, that’s possible! You can break your bones by simply coughing too much. The damage made it difficult for her to breathe.

Eventually, we convinced her to visit the doctor and she was prescribed an antibiotic that cleared her lung infection. Once she was breathing easy, her fever dissipated and her ribs could heal.  

We were one of the fortunate ones. We’re so thankful things didn’t turn out differently.   

My mom passed the sickness to her children, of course. In a three-bedroom cat-house, when three of the five members share a loft, there aren’t many places for a virus to hide. We all contracted it, but maybe it was age, maybe it was the fact that we all had jobs in public service, but we only got a mild cold. One brother was lucky enough to be completely asymptomatic. All of us with runny noses and phlegm at the back of our throats would roll our eyes at the unfairness of it all. 

And then the Corona-Panic swept in. Yet, my family breathed a sigh of relief. We’d barely dodged a bullet. Unlike many others, we’d already assumedly gotten the anti-bodies and had nothing to worry about. There would be no missing work, no need to fret about passing a test, or ultra-anxiety about a sickness we’d already experienced.     

In place of worry, came boredom. The boredom would build and build and build until it reached the brim of my patience. Cue me bursting into random bouts of tears over predictions I’d seen on the internet. Lock-down could last till June. We’d never touch another person outside our household again. I’d never get my job back.

All were traumatizing thoughts. I’m an extrovert that loves my job and meeting random strangers. Odd traits for a writer these may be, but it’s always been who I am. My interactions with people feed my imagination. Observing others spins my mind into a creative weave; creating characters and plots out of dynamics I see and experience. Which is how lock-down affected my most basic skill. My stories weren’t interesting. I didn’t even want to read. There was nothing there.  My imagination went on strike. Instead, there was an empty white space where those colorful events and dreams used to reside.

Things just didn’t seem worth it. So, I chose to do the easy thing; I drifted on the internet. Internet-drifting, while maybe fun for about an hour, is not great for the self-esteem. An Instagram post there about how I should be getting this ripped-bikini bod here. A rant on how we’d never leave our houses again there. 

It just shoved me more into the hold of the blank emptiness. I’d violently spike into an over-active emotional state and then come crashing back down again.  

So, if anyone asked, I was fine. Yep, I was fine. Totally okay.

And then I wasn’t. I wasn’t okay. I was banging cabinets, snapping at brothers, and collapsing into my mother’s arms to cry about how crappy my life was. Just play the Titanic soundtrack and let me eat my Cheetos in peace.  

Given I was 21, this was not acceptable behavior. But quarantine did bring out the worst in me. Everything my life might’ve been this year was taken; my dreams of going to conferences and traveling. My world that had seemed so big just months ago was now reduced to eight rooms and a basement.  

My weeks went from getting up on Monday, going to the grocery store—to it suddenly being Friday, and doing the laundry. Maybe a few walks were sprinkled in, but to put it in the most eloquent terms I know how:

It sucked big time.

By month two, I’d gotten the mood swings mostly under control. There was no “EUREAKA!” moment, just a gradual acclimatization to “Oh, so this is how life is now.” The walls of my house weren’t closing in on me. I wasn’t haunted by this almost spiritual claustrophobia.  

Soon enough, restrictions began to lift in my country.

I live in Germany. I’ve grown up here, and I wasn’t surprised at all by the citizens response to lock-down.  Most everyone was conscientious and followed the law. When the government told them to do something, they would do it with their typical rigid obedience.  

When lockdown began to lift and things began to open, I found myself thankful for the most ridiculous things.

I could visit the bank and not worry about making an appointment? I could work a 9-5 job? I could go swimming in a public place?! I didn’t even enjoy the pool and I was thankful it was open again.  

Little things like new flowers from the market made my day. Getting up to go to work seemed a blessing sent from heaven. My pen slowly drifted towards a sheet of paper again. A few short stories here and there and I began to look for publishing options for manuscripts all over again.

I started to look at the now-wide world around me. Things that had been “someone else’s” problem at the beginning of the year, I now felt for. I started to get involved in local politics, try to connect with the world around me in different ways than before.  

I switched jobs and found a place that I really enjoyed working. Not only am I still in public service, but I get to serve baked goods all day! Hardly anybody comes in a huff when they’re getting a box of doughnuts.

I connect not only with my co-workers, but also with wider world in general. I have a unique appreciation for my close-knit community. Family means so much more.

As for my writing, I’m brimming with ideas and unlikely plots again. My determination is renewed and I have a new perspective to bring to the table.  

So, while COVID might’ve trashed my plans, I might’ve come away with something different. An assuredness, a sense of gratitude, and confidence. 

Would I want 2021 to follow in this year’s footsteps? Absolutely not. But this year was not a waste!

And that’s enough for me.

If you enjoyed this piece, please follow Emma Vale on Twitter @EmmaValeWrites. 

It's Not All About COVID-19 by Erin Robinson (@flossybunny)

Everyone across the world is talking about how messed up 2020 has been so far. Mostly because of coronavirus (COVID-19). Mostly because they have had to quarantine for the first time in their lives. Everyone has been impacted in one way or another, but it's not why my 2020 has been hit hard. 

In January, when COVID-19 in the UK was a muttered swirl of speculation, I sent my Dad a photo of my son. It was the evening of January 5th and he was playing in a pop-up tent he'd been given for Christmas. I snapped the pic and immediately sent it off to my son's favourite person in the world—his Papa. There was nothing different about that evening, except it would be the last. 

On January 6th my Dad died. It was sudden, brutal, and traumatic. For him, it was likely very peaceful, but for my Mum and sister who tried to save him—for all of us who stood in the hallway waiting for the paramedics to save him…it was surreal. He stopped breathing. His heart stopped. He died. My 2020 was done from that moment onwards. 

As a family, our quarantine experience has been infused with grief and mourning for someone we loved. We had to make quarantine decisions that other people likely didn't have to make. Would my Mum manage for weeks or months on her own? Would I manage in that scenario? In the end, we all piled into my Mum's house and locked down together. Except we were not together—we were a family member down and, for the first time, we were facing the world as a new unit. 

In March and April we would comment to each other on how many days or weeks it had been since Dad died. We would look over at the far side of the living room where he passed, and we would feel the absence. We were locked in with our grief. There was no escaping it - we couldn't meet people for distractions; or go out for the day; or visit his grave. Processing grief in those conditions has been impossible and it feels like only now have we come out of denial. 

But it's not all bleak. We were given a break from the outside world for a while where we could sit with our loss. Quarantine provided us with time together as a family. We made memories. We celebrated birthdays over Facetime, dropped a makeshift Easter card through a friend's door, sunbathed in the garden, and consumed more apple pie than is socially acceptable. Yes, we grieved—we still are—but we also adapted to what our family looks like now. Quarantine gave us time that we never would have had. 

I learned that those moments of quality with people I love are irreplaceable. They could be taken any minute. Quarantine has been hard for many, but I continue to remind myself that I have been given time I normally never have. I can enjoy being at home. My local area has never felt more appealing. There are parks to walk around, TV shows to binge, snacks to be indulged in, toys to be played with, and lazy days to thrive in. I've not had to pass acquaintances in the street and tell them "I'm fine," when I'm not. That time is now ending, but I can slowly emerge from quarantine with a stronger soul. 

If you enjoyed this piece, please follow Erin Robinson on Twitter @flossybunny.