now that we’re in quarantine, some of us have to face our greatest enemy: ourselves

originally published on medium

I’ve had absolutely no choice but to accept it during this pandemic — I am super, super, super attached to side hustling my body for service. Right now, I don’t have some debt to pay or some basic income that needs to be met as our economy crumbles and the dollar is reset. And yet, I felt hesitant writing this post, wondering if it was going to be ‘digestible enough’ for other people to want to share. Worrying if I had properly ‘set up my Medium for maximal dollar accruing.’ Thinking about if every click was going to get me something.

This is capitalism under a microscope right now. We’ve shared memes about how we’re forced to hustle without ever being able to openly defy the phenomenon, and what do you get as soon as the pressure’s off? This awareness.

How do I now know this fact so deeply it’s cutting me? Spend a few days in isolation as an extrovert and the stir craziness, you find, isn’t linked to your circumstance. Nah, it’s because I have absolutely no one to distract me. I don’t watch a lot of TV, so I’ve sat for hours staring at walls, counting, categorizing and organizing my thoughts and trying to understand what’s going on.

My conclusion is: this grueling self reflection is my biggest cross to bear during quarantine because I have to deal with me.

I write to you with a shortness of breath that started last night and persisted all day until five minutes ago, when I decided to tap into my mental body awareness and figure out if I’m getting sick, or I’m just anxious about my productivity and worth, and the sense of helplessness I feel when I read the news. I have to deal with — do I even respect me? And right now, it’s quiet enough for my thoughts to be very loud. Answering as clearly as it can, “Nahhhhh, I don’t.”

We can talk all we want about the concept of community, and how we are physical distancing but not truly socially distancing. We can remind each other we got this, that we’re all one. But the theme I also see emerging for a lot of us with rising levels of depression and anxiety is — we’ve never quite had to sit alone with ourselves like this. Peel away the capitalistic curtain of focusing only on making money, and what’s left? All of those undiagnosed issues you had put off facing, now you have to figure out how to manage. Those personal feelings screaming for attention from you, like children that you previously handed off to a babysitter so you could make money, are now salient for you to learn how to parent.

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I’m pretty extroverted. In my adult life, I moved to Los Angeles so all of my alone time could be spent observing something interesting in public. Mostly the people I saw in public. Individuals hustling through a mall. Couples lounging at the beach. Little kids milling around a public park. I love being reminded everyone exists. I would walk around looking at their faces, wondering about their stories, taking in their energy, and it’s made me a great tarot reader and confidante.

But right now, if I turn off my laptop for one second, I can forget anyone exists very easily. If everyone else is gone, who’s left? Me.

And all of my demons — who, I really thought I was pretty acquainted with by now — are coming out to play. And that’s actually… pretty scary. I thought self isolation would be a fun exercise. I’ve worked from home as a freelancer for the past year, so I’m used to being indoors and have even slowly acquired other skills like cooking. What gives?

But once I let myself think thoughts I’ve been repressing because “they shouldn’t take priority during this time! People are dying!” my tightness cleared up, and oh my god, what’s left is realizing the reality of what I’ve thought for so long literally choking me.

Here’s one personal example of those thoughts. When I go on personal wellness Instagram accounts, I’m simultaneously comforted by their techniques and angry that I haven’t done that yet. My goal is to work in the realm of mental health as a content writer. I aspire to spread my spiritual philosophies, which I already give out to my friends in my spare time, in those shareable formats. I aspire to build up my blog presence and package all of my deep thoughts and feelings on how we ought to live. I haven’t done any of that because commodification has been my biggest obstacle. If I haven’t nailed down my marketing strategy so my stuff gets shared, why should I put any pen to paper?

For me, writing for pleasure has felt like such a waste of time when my writing should be used to inform people of something useful, damn it. I feel stupid even ranting at the world right now, as if I’m wasting space for begging for my feelings to be heard.

This aversion to “writing without knowing how it’s going to make me a profit” deal was a weird defense mechanism I accrued to feeling undervalued at my previous journalism jobs. While there, I was writing at breakneck speed and getting paid like maybe $10 an article that I poured my heart and soul into. When I got unceremoniously fired despite everything I’d done, I grew infuriated and was determined to never let myself get taken advantage of like that again. The issue with this thinking is when well paid writing jobs are either freelance and grueling and pitch-based/competitive, or they’re not in California, how do you keep your self worth healthy.

Mine is crumbling right now. While home alone, even though my parents, who are well off, promised to financially support me, even though I have enough groceries right now, even though I don’t have anywhere to even go spend any coin I could’ve earned, I’m still super attached to material gains. I want attention. I want recognition. If I don’t have money, I want to snap my fingers and be viral now.

I feel so stupid that these are my priorities while people are dying around me. Why should I be so preoccupied with this? Why can’t I be grateful that I don’t have to worry about even being alive during this time? Why can’t I be happy that my friendships have soared and thrived since I decided to try to be less capitalistic oriented?

I’ve wanted to write during the quarantine, because when else am I going to have a chance to write for pleasure? The last year of my life was spent freelancing and working part time because I refused to go back to an office job, but now I’m sitting here crying angrily that my gift doesn’t feel like mine anymore. I’m crying here because I’m more focused on whether anyone’s going to like my writing than whether I like it. I wrote so much in college. I wrote so much when I was living at home post-college. I haven’t done it for a year now, and I feel guilty and worthless.

So in quarantine, I now have to face that at some point, I stopped viewing myself as valuable, and as someone I was going to exploit for recognition and money etc. Writing is what saved me as a kid, and now it seems like it’s become a foil and obstruction to my self worth.

So I’m writing this today in the hopes that even sharing it on principle, sharing this as my truth, without having strategized about SEO content keywords in advance, is going to be the beginning of my redemption. I plan to write about whatever comes to mind during the virus times without thinking about helping as many people as possible. Because right now, even though we should be thinking about others, our ability to self care has never been more important. And in isolation, many of us are hopefully realizing — like me — that we’ve severely forgotten how to do that. Now’s the time to start.