quarantine, healing, and limitations

this is the beginning of my fourth week of quarantine. although i am not currently sick, i am effectively self-isolating, only leaving my room/flat to check my mail a few times a week, do laundry once every two weeks or so, and get food perhaps a couple of times a week.

i live alone, in london, at least an hour via public transport away from my geographically closest friends and family. the friend is a good one but dealing with their own stuff so we haven’t really talked very much; the family is complicated, as all families are. i am in a (really quite new) romantic relationship with someone who lives about two hours from me. the rest of the people i would not only call my friends but also rely on are on the other side of an ocean, as are my sister and parents.

i’ve been Very Online for over three years now, so i am used to the ways that distance and technology alter communication patterns. i am struggling because recently i have been trying quite hard to pull myself back into the corporeal, into irl space rather than url space. and i have not been entirely unsuccessful.

if this were two years ago i would take this as a sign that i shouldn’t try not to isolate myself, that i don’t deserve friends or in fact any meaningful interpersonal relationships, that i am irrevocably broken. for a long time i have believed these things. i don’t know when that changed or how i did it, and i’m certain that i didn’t do it alone, but somehow i have managed to develop compassion for myself. i think that’s what people mean when they say “love yourself”. it’s not the superficial consumerist kind of love that they think they mean or that corporations mean; it’s a belief in possibility. it’s hope.

even here i’m struggling to convey exactly what i mean, even in this format where i can delete and edit and shape my words to fit whatever i want them to. and i find myself self-editing in every conversation i have, now, even in video calls — i can mute myself, i can turn my video off, i can adjust angles and lighting and pick a background that is very clearly not my living space. and we know and we don’t know, both at once, that these functions are shaping how we experience our reality. they are adding to the surreality of quarantine, the feeling that time has been suspended and our actions don’t have the same consequences that they would have had otherwise. and it’s very difficult to shake this feeling.

i am spending a lot more time in bed because my blankets and my mattress mimic for me the feeling of being held. i am spending a lot more time in bed because i simply do not have the motivation to do anything. i am spending a lot more time in bed because it’s the biggest and most comfortable thing i can sit on in my room — i live in one room — and i can use all of my electronic devices while sitting or lying in bed. i can even, with minimal effort, play the cello while sitting on my bed.

i won’t go into Doing Work because that will depress me and i desperately need energy today.

i’m not sure how to tie this up nicely. maybe there isn’t a way to do that.