Nothing’s Changed; Everything’s Changed

Sadly, this is not my current state of affairs.

I’ve been wanting to write something about how I’ve been feeling through all this … waves hands at the world … but I’m having trouble getting my thoughts to settle down to even figure out how I’m feeling. I know I’m not at all alone in this, but I also recognize that everyone is feeling it in their own way.

The thing that’s the most difficult for me to wrap my head around is the fact that my life hasn’t changed. At least not yet. I don’t do the grocery shopping, and 80-90% of my social interaction happens online anyway. Most distressingly, my employer doesn’t have the IT capability to let all employees work remotely. I do have a laptop, and I’m set up to work remotely (which I do occasionally when the need arises), but we’ve been told we really should be in the office.

So right now, nothing is substantially different here. We don’t usually go out to eat, and we only see movies in the theatre a couple times a year. We do have semi-regular hang-outs with local friends, but those often get cancelled anyway.

Everything is the same.

But it’s not.

That’s what is twisting my brain around. So many of my friends are working from home for the first time (because their employers have IT systems that can handle it). They’re hunkering down in a way that’s new and different for them. The picture at the top of this post represents what my brain seems to think I should be doing these days, but I still have the same amount of day-job work, and I still have the same amount of home-job podcasting work (if not a little more right now).

In a way, I’m lucky(?) that so much of my life is pretty much “social distancing” at the best of times because there’s no learning curve. But on the other hand, the cognitive dissonance of going about my business while knowing that the world has already changed around me (and will change more, and for the worse, very soon) has my neural chemistry in quite the tizzy.

So if you’re not making many active changes (because you don’t need to), but you’re still struggling mightily, know that you’re not alone.

Take care of yourselves. <3