It is 5:21 am in the morning, and I just crawled out of our comfy bed in our new apartment and came into my home office to type this weeks blog. I cant sleep. Insomnia is now a thing again, more often than it has been in the recent past. Anxiety is now a thing again, often at its greatest height right around bedtime. Fear is now a thing again, stealing away my feeling of grounded-ness and safety that I had worked so hard for and so long for while grieving and trying to rebuild.

I didnt even want to write about Covid-19 in here this week. Everyone else is writing about it already, and literally everywhere you go , it follows. Plus, nobody is really going anywhere, so there isn’t much else to talk about except how this is affecting everyone and how we are all doing. I didn’t want to be just one more person writing about this, but the truth is, it overwhelms everything right now. It is all around us , like a takeover of our lives. Even now, sitting here in the quiet while my boyfriend is asleep in the next room, I can feel it overtaking me. The quiet has become quite loud.

As others have said, the feelings and emotions of this disease and all that it brings, are very familiar. We are a nation grieving. We are tense and nervous and scared and on edge, and so many other things. All of the ways in which we normally calm ourselves are no longer available. My swim routine at the YMCA is no longer a thing, because they are closed. Going out with friends is no longer a thing, because we put ourselves and them in danger every time we leave the house. In person therapy is no longer a thing. Sure, its offered online, and Im still doing it, but it is not even close to the same thing as sharing the same airspace with someone as you open up your vulnerabilities to them.

I hope we can come out of this, and part of me knows we can, but its the not knowing when that is so hard. Not knowing how much longer we will have to live inside these tiny cocoons of isolation. Not knowing how this will change loved ones who have immune systems that are compromised. Not knowing if they will be okay. Not knowing if I will be okay. Not because of the disease itself, but because of all the things it might steal from me. Things that I have fought so hard to get back. I would be very angry about that, if I weren’t already so exhausted.

And so it continues, and so we battle on ……