Depression
If the last eight weeks have taught me anything it is that life is full of ups and downs. I know, it’s a remedial lesson for most. One that many of us learn at an early age, but for some reason, I struggle with retention of that fact. As a result, I’m often surprised when I feel melancholy and can be taken aback when hit with anxiety. Consequently, those emotions can really cascade for me. I’ve learned to manage it, but it doesn’t change the fact that my wiring is such that negative emotions are particularly intense for me. When I began my work as a therapist, I learned that this was common amongst people with traumatic upbringings and amongst individuals with clinical depression and anxiety disorders. It was through that work, through exercise, medication, and many years of personal psychotherapy that I realized that I have come to manage my vulnerability to depression and to create mechanisms in my life to help balance its effects.
So, it’s a bit weird to admit that in an odd way, the last eight weeks has made a lot of sense to me. It’s as though my struggles with anxiety and depression over a lifetime have in some way prepared me for living in a more minimalist way. I guess the way I would explain it is that when your mind is constantly modulating around worst-case scenarios, when those things actually happen you are struck with an odd sense of relief. Life in quarantine makes sense to me in a way that “normal” living doesn’t entirely. I’d describe it as a visceral experience of “told you so.” Life in quarantine is simpler. It has a slower cadence and isn’t as focused on doing. Life in quarantine forces you to embrace the here and now, to just be, and to appreciate the little things. Instead of chasing the next experiential high that comes from interacting with an often cruel and insensitive world, life in quarantine centers on the things right in front of you - on nuclear family, immediate community, faith, and lastly, self. In a way that I am sometimes ashamed to share, it has brought me relief, even joy. And, in some ways, I will miss it when inevitably we return to the hustle and bustle that is Bay Area life.
Living The New Normal
So living under quarantine for the last eight weeks, for myriad reasons, has been a profoundly positive experience for me. As, for the first time in my life, I’m not in a rush to be anywhere or to do anything. My life has been simplified by the experience of sheltering in place. In this new normal I wake up, eat, shower, work, exercise, shop, socialize, read, write, and play all within five square miles of my home. In fact, on many days I only leave the house to take a walk with my family, or to take a run around my neighborhood. This experience has forced me to distill the essence of my life into much simpler tasks. It’s a way of living that I, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, wouldn’t have fathomed as being a fit for me. In fact, if you told me that I could be happy spending eight weeks isolated from the rest of the world and spending almost all of my recreational time hanging with my wife, daughter, and our pets I would have sarcastically made a quip about “romantic notions” of simple living as being something out of a Norman Rockwell painting, but not real life. Well, here we are and I’ve come to really enjoy it. To capture it, about three weeks ago I began taking pictures of my family during the “little moments” that we have been sharing together. I must confess that I began doing so because I felt that soon our lives would return to the previous cadence of rush, hustle, and bustle and I wanted to be able to look back on these images and to remember what we had. I also wanted to capture the little ways that we had begun using technology to connect ourselves to family and friends. So, I began sereptitiously capturing shots of my wife, Gina, homeschooling our daughter. I also wanted to capture images of the little things we were choosing to do together for fun - virtual dungeons and dragons with my siblings, lego builds, board games, long walks around the neighborhood, making up trampoline games (my daughter’s favorite is when we put water balloons in the trampoline and jump until all of them explode), setting up the tent in the back yard, and marathon games of ping/pong. In short, the new normal is a “simpler” life that focuses on deepening our engagement with each other in lieu of doing so with the outside world. And, I have grown to love it. And suffice it to say that when the shelter in place order inevitably begins to relax and we all start slipping back into our old habits, a part of me will miss the quiet that we have created together...
