Lockdown
Well, I don’t know about you lot but I handled the news of Stage 4 restrictions REALLY well. Within 24 hours I had converted all of my clients to online Zoom sessions, put the word out to attract more business and posted some cute Instagram stories featuring sessions I was running. I created a new budget for the next six weeks and correlating targets for myself. I colour coded my diary with highlighters (purple=Zoom) and put second hand clothes on Marketplace. I meal prepped, I trained, I sent motivating and encouraging messages to clients and friends. I called my Mum in NZ, I contacted my landlord, I put in an application for a rental relief grant. Fuck I’m nailing this, I tell my psychologist at our (hardship discounted) appointment on Tuesday, and he agrees that I have indeed handled this latest adversity with phenomenal levels of resilience.
Then it was Wednesday.
My alarm went off at 6am and I just lay there, blankly staring at the wall and listening to it ring obnoxiously. Graham head butted my lifeless body and meowed for breakfast, and I wondered morbidly how long it would take him to start eating my corpse if I died alone in my one bedroom apartment. I’d spent a large part of the night before bawling hysterically to my boyfriend via Face-time (given the current curfew restrictions which prevented us from speaking in person), and had finally gone to bed a soggy mess after watching an episode of Project Runway Allstars in an attempt to redeem the evening. I don’t know why things always hit me in delay, as if my mind is in a different timezone, but the realisation of spending the next six weeks in FULL lockdown had suddenly kicked me in the fucking throat. When I finally got up 20 minutes later, turned off my alarm, fed Graham (priority) and looked in the mirror, my eyes squinted back at me through swollen, dough-like eyelids and I’ve got dried snot caked to my various nose jewellery. Fuck I’m a piece of shit, I tell Graham.
There’s one thing I know for sure, this is definitely a cookie for breakfast kind of day.
This polar opposite lurching from high as a kite to gutter levels of mood and motivation thing is something I’m quite familiar with. I refer to it as over and under functioning. Given the situation we are currently in (because it isn’t actually ALL about me), I would imagine that these are both familiar states of being for others, which is why I’m sharing my experience with it. I’m lucky enough to be the high as a kite version probably 90% of the time, which is great, however that only makes the swift descents into total despair even more brutal. It’s like, when you have had a decent break from drinking (pre-COVID, obviously), and then one night you’re like fuck it and go HAM on a couple bottles of wine and wake up facedown on the kitchen floor surrounded by McDonalds chips with your shoes and jacket still on. My thinking is that I need to just accept these peaks and troughs of productivity and ability to cope with life, and that the real issue is how fast I can turn it around.
Speaking of that. It’s now Thursday and I’m OK. My eyes look almost normal and I brushed my hair, put on eyebrow pencil, and did the grocery shopping. I’m OK, today. I may not be next Wednesday though, and that’s OK too. I think we need to accept that we are all on a bit of a roller coaster and we likely all have our own personal Wednesdays. To a certain extent, we are grieving the temporary loss of life as we have always known it, and it’s impossible to imagine that won’t take its toll. We all miss different things, and whilst you may not understand someone else’s hysterical meltdown, you likely have your own irrational tantrum around the corner. This is fucking hard, and it’s OK be be struggling. If you spend one day of the week eating Nutella from the jar and thinking about what you’d want to be buried in (remember given the current funeral restrictions no one will even see your body so you may as well just wear track-pants) and the rest of the week churning out Zoom personal training sessions and tracking your calories, then that’s OK, right?
All LOLs aside, there are a lot of reasons to under-function right now. Making light of it can help, but if you are genuinely concerned for your mental health please reach out to a professional or contact one of the following helplines:
Lifeline Australia: 13 11 14
Beyond Blue: 1300 22 4636 24
