On March 11, my birthday, I had plans to go out for a small dinner with my partner. It was mid-week, and a more elaborate family event was coming over the weekend, so this was more of a mini-commemoration than a celebration itself. Earlier in the NBA, Rudy Gobert tested positive for COVID-19 and the NBA shut down. Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson announced that they were going into quarantine in Australia after testing positive as well. It was the official start of lockdown. I cancelled my dinner plans and we stayed inside, overwhelmed by that overwhelming feeling of history’s shadow passing overhead.

It is hard for me to describe what quarantine life has been like without sounding a little bit selfish. All things considered, I have led a fortunate life even just by American standards. When I see ravaging hurricanes and earthquakes, they are always in the distant past or in distant states. Even during the annual California wildfires, I’ve had not to deal with much more than hazy skies and the pervasive smell of smoke. It is one of my uncounted luxuries to never have to deal with much more than that.

The coronavirus pandemic has made the unmooring of natural disasters available to all of us. The dread that I felt in mid-March was mostly informed by the realization that everything will be different now, but we can’t see what that means. We could only slowly live through it, second by second, until one day we look back and realize that something hasn’t returned.

The lockdown also coincided with a 2 week PTO vacation for my partner and I. Instead of taking a trip to the Philippines (our original plan) or a train up to Monterey (our plan B), we instead embarked on the most staycation-ass weeks ever. We panic-bought puzzles and rededicated ourselves to periphery hobbies like wood carving and drawing. We took care of long-delayed projects like lining my kitchen shelves. To a particular type of homebody this probably qualifies as a great time. But with the undercurrent of dread, buttressed by a Twitter news addiction, it feels like a great time designed to stop feeling reality a little too deeply.

But you do what you must to get through the Interesting Times. One thing that has struck out to me is that I’ve had to take affirmative care of my mental health. As a self-identified sad boy I would normally play this situation face up. I would have stared into the abyss, or so I thought. It turns out that might all be emo posturing and that the real abyss is not something I actually want to take on. I found myself feeling an aversion to my favorite sad songs, or dark movies, or anything that would be too real. I had to actively put on music, preferably pleasant and breezy music, to ward off the dread that comes with silence. These basic acts of self care are things I had never really practiced before.

There’s still more of this crisis ahead of us than there is behind us. I’m counting on the normalizing process to see us fully through it, and it is working to some degree. The human body can only be in a full panic for so long. At some point it understands the panic as the regular state of things, and the world will feel manageable once again. I just have to have faith that we’ll get there.