The long haul
Up until now, my strategy for staying sane in quarantine has been to work all the time. I’m a journalist writing for one of the most important scientific publications in the world, and we’re in the midst of a global pandemic. Of course I had to work all the time! My contributions were always bound to pale in comparison to those of reporters specializing in public health and infectious diseases, but I could marshal my own expertise and network of sources to help put what we’re experiencing in a larger historical context. So I did.
Finishing a big feature is always an adjustment, and I often need a break afterward to relearn how to think about other things. But publishing my pandemics and inequality feature really threw me for a loop. I had been working on it since the very beginning of quarantine. Now I’m done with it, and quarantine is nowhere near being over—especially not for me, a person who already worked from home, doesn’t have kids, and doesn’t need to get back out in the world for economic reasons. I no longer have that project giving me the sense of urgency and purpose that powered me through the first two months of this new life. Over the past week or two, it’s felt like I had to figure out how to live in quarantine all over again.
This is the conclusion I’ve come to: I can no longer treat this as An Exceptional Time. We’ve been talking about The New Normal as if it’s something still to come, as if it’s the stage that will naturally arrive after quarantine. But that’s not right. What we’re doing right now, this is The New Normal. Rather than thinking about what I will do when this is over, I’ve started asking myself, what do I need to do to live this way forever?
This may sound unbelievably depressing. It hasn’t felt that way though. It’s felt liberating. It’s meant that I no longer feel like I have to be constantly monitoring and responding to the outside world, and that I can and should make choices about how to use my time and attention. Are case counts still growing in Mexico? (Yes.) How many people have died? (Who knows.) What’s the reopening plan? (A stoplight system for each state.) It’s not right to say that I no longer care about the answers to these question. I care a lot. I’ve just realized that they have no bearing on how I will spend today, next week, next month, the rest of the year. Economically, I can be the last person in the country to come out of quarantine. That’s a privilege, and thus a responsibility. I will be in here for an unknown and unknowable stretch of time that, psychologically, might as well be forever. How do I make that possible? How do I make that bearable?
Obviously, I can no longer work all the time. But I do need to feel a sense of steady forward momentum. So for now I’ve settled on writing for two hours every weekday. If writing isn’t happening, I can look out the window in my office. For those two hours, those are my options. And once I’m done—usually before lunch at 2—I feel accomplished and justified in spending my late afternoon and evening calling friends, doing yoga, baking a cake, or whatever else I want to do. I’ve been doing this for a week, and it’s been great and also hard. The more I do it, though, the easier it will get.
For support in this fragile beginning of a new habit, I signed up for the novelist Jami Attenberg’s 1000 Words of Summer. Every day for two weeks, you write 1000 words. Attenberg sends you encouraging emails written by her and other writers, for free. That’s it. This year’s edition runs from May 29 to June 11. I’m going to focus less on word count and more on protecting and respecting my two-hour daily block. If this sounds like something that might help you build quarantine habits for the long haul, please join me and sign up here. If you tell me you’re doing it (just reply to this newsletter email), we can also send encouraging emails to each other!
I don’t mean this to sound like a manifesto of quarantine productivity. Now more than ever, external outcomes are meaningless and beyond our control. This is about figuring out what you need to do to maintain quarantine sanity. For me, it’s establishing a routine that prioritizes creative work and lets me feel ok about relaxing after lunch. It will look different for you. Maybe you are desperate for more in-person interactions, and it’s time to carefully, consciously expand your quarantine bubble. Maybe you need a more equitable housework or childcare arrangement with the person or people you live with. Maybe you need to really, truly commit to at-home exercise. Maybe you need to do schedule more video calls—or way fewer video calls. Whatever you need to change, do it. The time for powering through is over. What do you need to do to live this way forever?
Programming note
I will be taking the next three weeks off from writing this newsletter while I focus on 1000 Words of Summer and my overall quarantine sanity. I’ll be back in your inbox on June 21.