Quarantine Update #1: Survival Mode

Some days, you just have to say “f it”

It has been a hot minute, rather months, since I wrote my last blog post. Life has been interesting, to say the least, but who’s hasn’t been? Have you ever had one of those days, the kind that you never want to wake up to again, where everything goes wrong and nothing you do is right? The ones where your middle finger answers everything, the one where even your coffee needs a coffee? Well, that is how I have felt (and I’m sure a lot of you have as well) since COVID hit. Coronavirus has flipped the world upside down wreaking havoc on families, plans, graduations; you name it, COVID has affected it. We’ve been under quarantine for about 4 months now and I would bet that I am not the only one about to go crazy.

My brother and SIL had their first baby back in March at the beginning of lockdown, my other brother and SIL are due in October and one of the things that resonated the most with me about my SIL being a new mother (in fact any new mother I have talked to, even pre-covid) describes the first few months as “survival mode”. That is how I have felt since COVID first showed it’s ugly face.

There are days when I feel stuck, like nothing is going according to plan. There are days when I start crying uncontrollably for no reason. Days when all I can say is “why” because nothing has gone right. Many of these days over the last few months (how is it already the middle of June?) I feel like I’m not doing enough, I see so many people handling quarantine like a champ, living their best possible quarantine life (granted this is through a social media highlight reel lens), but it puts me in a place of being hard on myself for not doing enough or being enough.

I’m sure many of us have been hard on ourselves lately (if I could, I would raise about 100 hands because hey, it’s me), and many of us who feel like we are just surviving, in every sense of the word, trying to make it to the other side of the pandemic. There have been so many days that I just sit there and say “f it” because I’m done with the day.

This is pretty much how I feel about quarantine in general. Over the last few days I’ve had to sit back and realize that nothing is going to change in the near future, to stop waiting for any sign of good news and to instead, be thankful that I woke up another day, to get out of this survival mode that I have been stuck in for months. We are so blessed to be here still, to have time with family and friends that we never would have gotten before (socially distant, of course) and that even though things are going as planned, as least we have a future to make plans for.

So you know what….to the days that make you feel badly about yourself, to the days you didn’t get everything done you wanted to, to COVID, to the months we have spent sitting around, to the times where you feel like everyone is getting ahead and you are stuck in one spot:

F it.

Let go of all the stuff you wanted to do. Life is too short to be angry with yourself for being human. Embrace the unknown, embrace change, get out of this survival mode and wake up tomorrow with a new outlook on everything going on right now.