Welcome to my intermittent newsletter! Because this year is highly dramatic and my current situation is kind of inherently dramatic, I wanted to write 30 short essays about the unique circumstances I’m dealing with right now before I take a distinct break from writing and generally “being online,” even in these lonely times. Kind of a pop-up writing challenge.
In previous times of massive depression, I have had some pretty excellent tells. I have watched a lot of shows on streaming. I have watched a whole show starring Bella Thorne on streaming. But the tell that sticks, however, is when I had no energy to do anything, but I did the research to find out the easiest way to wash my face. I hadn’t been doing it, I didn’t want to do it; but reading about sticks that you basically wet and rub over your face and boom, you have a “clean face,” that seemed like a possible solution. (Now I use micellar water, which is the lazy French girl’s way to wash your face. And during depression, it really works!)
But right now, six months into the coronavirus pandemic, I have been feeling depressed. I think. I’m not sure. There are mitigating factors here: six months of a scary virus in the world, and the government has done nothing to slow it down, so if you take it seriously you are permanently on the defensive in regards to anything that you do. Having to live from a defensive, crouched position is hard. We are in a recession. Seeing, feeling, and fighting America’s inequalities, the viciousness of racism and police brutality, the trauma of all this being recorded and live-streamed, and countered with white nationalists who feel like they can walk around with AK-47s freely, stoked along by the cruel narcissist in the white house.
I am also six months into a pregnancy, which has gone as well as it can but, again, is coming from a defensive, crouched position. Every decision I’ve made has been thinking about coronavirus first. I have doctors with impeccable waiting rooms and mediocre bedside manner. I drive to appointments. I go to them alone. I fiddle with my phone while dealing with the sonogram, with the doctor, so I can loop Stu into the conversation.
And also: pregnancy means hormones. I’ve had depression before. I know I’m at a higher risk for it during and after pregnancy. And while I have felt really great, viscerally so; I get solid sleep now that I have a CPAP machine (however: trying to sleep in a city during a pandemic has had its problems from fireworks to rogue house DJs setting up in the parks), and going off everything once I found out I was pregnant was surprisingly frictionless, now I’m just tired. This pandemic is stretching on. Any possible fun things to plan around pregnancy are unnecessarily complicated. The likelihood that the time after birth will need to be isolated is very high. I ask questions and nobody has any answers beyond “take it one day at a time.” You know, like when you are in Alcoholics Anonymous.
Recently I’ve been feeling the results. Straight-up anhedonia. All possible escapism, movies, tv, books, just feels especially blah. Thinking about anything like the future is mostly overwhelming and generally hopeless. (And this distinct lack of hope is why I truly hate the current criminal occupant in charge.) But what’s been worse is just seeing my reactions to things. I feel like a malfunctioning robot. Great news: shock and disassociation until I’m too hyper to sleep. Anger: just sort of permanent, inchoate, ready to be sprung anywhere. Panic attacks: coming on back with a vengeance!
I can’t exercise to the degree I’d like to (pregnancy), and the weather is too hot to do much of anything. I can’t leave the country because an American passport is currently worthless, but a goodly percentage of my family is filled with ex-pats in other countries who I’m not likely to see for two years at least when another major event happens in my life.
But what I’m struck by is just how normal these feelings feel right now. I don’t think I’m alone in general frustration, PTSD, a vague agoraphobia, and inability to focus. My circumstances are generally lucky and my brain is weary. But what makes me worry is the very feeling of not being alone in feeling sensitive and sad and depressed. Plenty of circumstances have people primed for depression on top of a once-in-many-lifetimes pandemic on top of a horrifying failure of every single structure and system in America. Even if and when this virus is something like a memory, there’s going to be a huge mental health toll in its wake. Frankly a whole generation of women giving birth this year are uniquely primed for it. And nobody’s talking about it.
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