Tag: love in the time of covid-19

Goal Setting in the Age of the Great Tire Fire

Posted on by Dianne Sylvan

I find myself contemplating the second half of 2020, and aside from “What’s next, space monkeys? A plague of frogs? War with Finland? Another Minions movie? …oh goddamn it,” I am considering how my priorities have changed in the last six months.

I look back at my January 2020 goal-setting and I laugh and laugh and laugh. I mean who hasn’t thought, “This is going to be my year, I’m going to get my poop in a group and make big changes and accomplish A-Z and really do better at all my everything!” at the start of every year of their adult lives? But 2020…wow, y’all.

I had, on my list, things like finishing the novel I was working on and getting a second book underway. I planned to increase my income by a certain amount, finally get that yoga practice going, etc. And while in theory I could finish a book during quarantine, let’s be honest here: This has not been a productive time just because it’s been a non-busy time. Our brains and hearts are working extra hard dealing with all of this even if we haven’t had to take on extra responsibilities for our families or jobs.

I think it’s important to have goals even now – not big life things necessarily but just something to strive for, something to help keep you anchored in your life. But those goals don’t exist in a vacuum. What’s going on out there will absolutely affect what we can accomplish in here.

I ask myself, what do I want to nurture in my life for the rest of the year? What do I need more of right now? And then, what’s a small thing I could add to my day that would help nudge me toward that? For my longer-term big goals, picking some wee aspect to chip away at could mean progress without overwhelm.

Overwhelm is a thing I’ve come to understand on a new level in the last few months. The continuous onslaught on my mental health coming from the outside world has lowered the amount of energy I have available. I have to respect that and not pretend I’m going to feel “normal” again any time soon. 2020-life depression might just be a new way my depression manifests itself that I have to learn how to live with. (Thanks, America.)

All of that in mind, and considering my original goals, I’ve decided to take a massive dose of Phucumol (talk to your doctor today!) and, with a mighty YEET!, toss them all and start from scratch.

There are three smallish things I want to do/start doing:

  1. Eat a little more healthfully, specifically not ordering out all the time but eating actual home-cooked food with vegetables in it that aren’t potatoes, and maybe drinking some actual water? Cutting back on the deliveries will be good for my budget too.
  2. Move. Just a little. I really really want to figure out a way to get myself on the yoga mat, even for five minutes at a time. I have plenty of resources and a good chunk of time in the afternoon after work I could use, I just…haven’t.
  3. Write. Creative outlets are very important to me in general, but now especially. I do want to keep blogging, but I also want to pick a larger project and stick with it for a while. I haven’t decided which project that will be just yet.

Eat, move, write. That doesn’t sound so insurmountable. They’re all things I can still do while the world is a giant tire fire.

What are your tire-fire goals?

2020, Second Draft

Posted on by Dianne Sylvan

I’m going to say this up front: America fucked up.

It was a losing battle from the beginning with the narcissistic ignorant grifter in charge and all his equally repugnant cronies guaranteeing there would not be enough testing, enough aid, or enough time before the country “opened back up.”

Let’s make one thing very clear. America never “closed.” It just let white people go home and bake bread while people of color, other minorities, and the poor involuntarily shouldered the burden of keeping vital services running for the rest of us.

If things keep going as they have–and there’s no reason to believe otherwise given how badly people are behaving just because they’ve been asked to put a piece of fabric on their faces for an hour here and there (I wonder if those Klan hoods impede their delicate respiration too?) that things won’t be worst-case scenario–it’s not just 2020 we’ve lost. It’ll be most of, if not all of, 2021 as well, depending on vaccine availability.

I’m not trying to doomsay here, I’m just trying to look at what’s laid out in front of us. This is not going away any time soon. The life that we had at the beginning of this year is over for a while. That means we need to manage our expectations.

Most of us have been treating the pandemic as a short-term problem; for other countries it has been. But America fucked up, as it is wont to do. It didn’t have to be this way, but this is what we have to work with while we keep trying to make it better.

We have to find ways to care for our mental health under the relentless onslaught. We have to find ways to keep adapting and to adjust the changes we’ve already made to shore them up long-term. What can you do to make your at-home life more sustainable for the long haul? Do you need particular equipment to help make working from home easier? Do you need to try a meal kit service or learn about batch cooking and prep to make feeding your household less draining? What can you to make your home more comfortable to stay in every day? Do you need make standing weekly Zoom dates to look forward to? A chore chart? Look at what has worked, and what hasn’t, the last few months. What are you lacking? How can you create more of it?

Your quarantine does not have to be a cocoon. It can just be where you keep your shit as together as possible. You don’t have to emerge ripped, speaking Cantonese, with a homemade sourdough loaf in each hand.

Make the best of things, absolutely, but acknowledge and accept that THIS FUCKING SUCKS. It SUCKS and it’s HARD and you’re ANGRY and SCARED and you want to cry and scream and you want to hug your Mom and you CAN’T, DAMN IT. All the weeks we spent doing the right thing have been undone by a bunch of selfish assholes, and IT SUCKS.

I think the most important thing we can do is admit that things are going to be a mess for a long time and then get off our (metaphorical) butts and get on with living our lives in whatever form they have to take.

We may not be able to avoid a perilous future but we can still help mitigate the longer term. America’s track record with learning from its mistakes is, well, not stellar, but we can still do better, both as individuals and as a nation. I cling to the hope that by November it won’t be too late to turn things around or at least wrench them from their blindfolded gallop toward a cliff. But to even have a chance, we have to VOTE! Meanwhile there are city council meetings to sit in on, letters to write to lawmakers, petitions to sign. You can do a lot from home!

Most importantly do not give up. One way or another we’re going to get through this. I can’t make any promises about how, or what the world will look like on the other side, but we’ll get there. Take care of yourself, take care of others, and get used to editing the plans you make for how life is “supposed” to go.

The first draft is usually crap anyway.

All You Can Do is Breathe

Posted on by Dianne Sylvan

Lately I’ve watched so many people experience something I know all too well from life with Bipolar II, though on a more condensed timeline than I’m used to:

You have a few days where you feel pretty okay. You’re productive, calm, can take most things in stride. The pandemic can’t last forever; there are good things to look forward to. You feel you’re adapting as well as can be expected. Life is weird as heck but you’re working with it.

Then you have one day (maybe two) where you can’t get out of bed. You don’t get anything done. You might just sleep. Everything is too much, especially the outside world…and the idea of ever leaving quarantine is almost as terrifying as the idea of it lasting a week longer. I saw someone on Twitter call these days the Hell Zone.

If this is happening to you, I am so sorry. Nobody should have to visit the Hell Zone, ever. It absolutely sucks that the one thing we can all do to make a positive impact out there – stay the heck home – is also a big contributing factor to depression!

If you pay any attention to the outside world at all the onslaught of uncertainty, outrage, and fear is relentless. Our poor neurotransmitters were not prepared for this. Fight-or-flight is one thing; “Scream impotently at the TV or cry on the toilet, repeat for three months” is another.

Some days, all you can do is breathe, and it turns out, that can be a huge help.

Breath work is almost instantly calming. Why? Well, think of how an animal breathes when she’s freaking out or just escaped a predator. Short breaths, shallow, high in the chest. Now think about how you breathe most of the time – for Americans it tends to be short breaths high in the chest. The way we breathe can put us in a constant low-level OMG-WTF-RUN! state.

The remedy is to breathe deep from your belly, getting your diaphragm involved, and let your chest be the last thing that fills up with air. Deep, slow breaths tell your body and brain that the threat has passed and you can let go of that pesky cortisol.

Working with my breath is fundamental to my spiritual practice. I learned the basic technique that I use courtesy of certified Zen badass Thich Nhat Hanh; in his writing he calls it “mindfulness verses.”

All you have to do is, as you inhale down to your belly, mentally recite “Breathing in, I…” followed by what you’d like to have happen or what you’re doing; then as you exhale at the same speed, think, “Breathing out, I…”

The simplest version:

“Breathing in, I know I am breathing in;
Breathing out, I know I am breathing out.”

Then you can up the stakes and invoke the state you want:

“Breathing in, I feel calm;
Breathing out, I feel safe.”

And so on. The important thing is that you’re bringing your attention to the act of breathing as well as the feeling you want to create within yourself. Timing chants or prayers with the breath is an easy way to intensify their effects on your mind and body as well as draw up more energy to put toward your goal.

I recently happened across a prayer that was a more Christianized version of Zen mindfulness verses; it was spoken to God, and it connected the in-breath with a positive attribute of the Almighty and the out-breath with something the practitioner wanted to give up to Him. I liked the idea, so I created one of my own, and I thought I would share it with you.

Take this idea and use it, adapt the wording to your own beliefs; take out “Your” if you’d rather not deal with personified Deity at all. But do give this kind of easy but powerful practice a try next time you feel unmoored, are having a Hell Zone Day, or just want to pause a moment and allow yourself to pause and reflect.

The Heretic’s Beltane

Posted on by Dianne Sylvan

A NOTE BEFORE WE BEGIN: I am about to put forth some no-doubt unpopular opinions about the religion of my 20s, and I want to make it clear that this is based on MY experience. I should not be considered an authority on Wicca, especially since it’s been a decade since I called myself one and I am not involved in the Pagan Community at all. I am absolutely sure Wicca has evolved since my time; I am basing this on my life mostly in the 00s, starting in the period of 1990s Pop-Wicca when Silver RavenWolf’s “Teen Witch Kit” caused so much pearl-clutching. I am not trying to be an iconoclast. I’m just trying to be true to what I’ve lived, in the hope that if you’re in a similar place you won’t feel alone. That said:

This past weekend brought the Pagan festival of Beltane, and I kept thinking, “I should write something about this.” But then I kept thinking, “I don’t want to write about a holiday I don’t like!”

That’s right, folks, allow me to introduce myself, a Pagan who hates Beltane.

If you don’t already know, Beltane is considered one of the high holidays, or Sabbats, of many NeoPagan traditions, including Wicca, which I practiced for well over a decade. It is a “cross-quarter” day that falls midway between equinox and solstice; Samhain, aka Halloween, is another. In fact Samhain and Beltane are the two biggest festival dates, possibly because they fall during times of the year when big festivals outdoors are be doable without heat stroke or frostbite.

That was problem one, I found – in a lot of places, including Western Europe where Wiccan festivals were codified as such, May is still part of Spring. Most of the natural symbolism and iconography didn’t really apply here in Texas where it is already 90 on May 1 and Spring is basically in the rearview mirror. Before I even got to the mythology involved I had to change out the correspondences.

Really though, Beltane was a fertility festival. Pagan or not you’ve surely seen a Maypole in you time, but you might not have realized it is, essentially, a giant beribboned dick that everyone dances around – symbolic phallus worship.

Oddly enough I did not find this practice appealing.

Nor have I ever been into the hyperfocus on sex – specifically heterosexual coitus – as this grand sacred end-all-be-all in my religion. My experience was that Wicca in general was way too sexualized, and the guiding myth by which the Goddess gave birth to the God and then…I’m not sure how it worked but She basically waited until He was grown, shagged Him, then bore Him again the next year…I found intensely distasteful, particularly through the lens of my own personal history. I was told “it’s just a story,” but aren’t the stories we tell about Deity kind of important? Don’t those concepts and symbols work their way into the bedrock of our belief system? If it’s “just a story,” why not stay “Christian” but say it’s not important whether Jesus was crucified or not, let’s just say he wasn’t, and died at 80 surrounded by fat grandchildren.

The ideal put forth by Wiccans was that the religion is feminist, or at least non-masculinist, but if you looked at the specific traditions established by Gerald Gardner, and many traditional lines formed from his ideas, it’s a little difficult to find that in practice. The emphasis was on heteronormative coupling – lots of it – and since Gardner was a naturist there was a lot of ritual nudity as “a sign that you are truly free.” The figure of the High Priestess was almost always depicted as a traditionally beautiful thin white woman who really, really loved the Great Rite.

Now, I learned very quickly that a lot of what considered itself Wiccan (including myself most of those years) only partly adhered to its original rituals. A lot of what I encountered was really more of a blend of Wiccan concepts with more feminist ideals, sometimes to the extreme of cutting out the God altogether. People still clung to the Wiccan label because that was what was popularized, and it gave groups and solitaires an identity to hang on to when the rest of the world was hostile toward any NonChristian belief structure.

But even with the most Goddess-heavy groups, the emphasis on female biology as her defining characteristic (Maiden, Mother, Crone – these are all based on stereotypically “feminine” stages of biological development) still placed limits, still established a cishet focus that at heart excluded anyone who wasn’t born with female organs or whose life stages did not progress according to the timeline, so, in yet another religion, the idea that humans are made in God’s image (or She in ours) did not apply to all women.

As you can tell I am not a fan of trans-exclusionary radical feminists. I don’t want to hear from them, like ever, thanks.

In my mind, religion is what you do with other people, and spirituality is what you do with God; in a lot of ways hanging onto a Wiccan identity was for me a way to connect with others even though my own practice and connection with Deity and nature bore very little resemblance and used maybe 40% of the rituals “everyone else” did.

I wrote an entire book about, let’s be honest, practicing Wicca without necessarily practicing all of Wicca. I really got into the idea that the religion was evolving and could be what we made of it. (I still believe this and I hope it has continued to evolve in my absence.) I also tried creating my own tradition, you might remember, and the coven I belonged to definitely had its own way of doing things that was…sort of Wiccan? But even before my crisis of faith and the decade of nothing that followed, I was already realizing that there’s only so far you can stretch a label before it tears apart.

One of the few really fun things about jettisoning the label was that I could drop the pretense that I was at all interested in many of the Sabbats. To be honest the only ones I celebrated on my own were the Equinoxes, Mabon and Ostara; I’m not really sure why those two in particular appealed to me more than the others, but they remain my favorites. If I were to hazard a guess I’d say that the liminality of them attracted me – they are each a precipice, a transition moment between the light and dark halves of the year, and my relationship with Deity was always and still remains centered around the concept of a Light and Dark face to Her/Him, corresponding with those halves.

The interplay of light and darkness is kind of my jam. I’m a double Scorpio with lifelong cyclical depression. I guess I was predisposed.

I could, if I wanted, try to reclaim Beltane for myself. That’s certainly something I would recommend exploring to anyone who has fallen out of love with their religious practices – dig down into the meaning of the holiday, all the myths involved, all the usual symbols, and consider ways in which the holiday might apply to your own life and beliefs. Beltane is a day of rising action, of burgeoning energy as the Light part of the year really gets going. It’s about tending those seeds planted earlier in the year and helping them grow and grow. It’s a waxing quarter Moon, a time of getting your ass moving.

It’s also a good time to look at the things you wanted to do with your year and re-evaluate what’s working and what isn’t. If that habit you tried to start back around Ostara didn’t get anywhere (six weeks being a typical fatigue time for humans when it comes to change, and the Sabbats each being six weeks apart), see if there’s a different way to look at it, a different method. It’s a time to course-correct after a few moments of fiery honesty with yourself.

Now, Beltane in the time of COVID-19 is a bit different. If you’re like me all the plans you made for 2020 have kind of fallen to shit in the last couple of months, and you’re at loose ends, or coming unraveled entirely. This whole societal experience has shown a lot of people what’s important and what isn’t; it might be a good time to make that list for yourself, and make some decisions about what you really, truly want to invest yourself in going forward and what really wasn’t that important to begin with.

For me, remaking Beltane to suit myself is one of those unimportant things. There may come a year when I’m ready to take on that challenge, but for now, I’m content to celebrate the Sabbats I really love, and say “Happy Beltane” to those who observe it, “Happy May Day” to those who don’t, and “I hope you and those you love are safe and well” to everyone reading this, may all manner of things be well.

A More Literal Sort of Lunacy

Posted on by Dianne Sylvan

This week of shelter-in-place has been harder for me than those previous, I suppose because we’ve officially passed one month here in Austin since the order was given and at bare minimum there are two more coming, though who knows? At this rate the tiny army of depressingly privileged idiot white people protesting against saving the lives of people who do labor for them might get their way, and they’ll have regained the freedom to force poorer people to cut their hair and paint their nails and bring them the Red Blooded ‘Murcan Platter at TGIFriday’s or whatever so stock prices can go up-up-up and human beings can be cut down-down-down.

Anyway.

As you can probably tell, the whole situation is taking a toll on me, as I’m sure it is on you too. The world has already worn out my Last Good Nerve and I’m down to basically the Bottom of the Dollar Store Bin Nerve. Thank god for meditation, medication, and masturbation, am I right?

(I may cut that line, or I may just bask in its ridiculous glory for all the internet to see.)

At any rate, I didn’t come here to rant and rave like a lunatic, I actually came to talk like a Lunatic about the Dark Moon, the New Moon, and the early Waxing phase in the lunar cycle.

In my experience a lot of people of a mystical/magical bent lump the Dark and New Moons together in terms of their spiritual and magical significance. You certainly could do that; after a time of waning energy, of divesting Herself of her glowing raiment one shoulder at a time, the Moon vanishes from the sky for a moment and we’re left in a period of vast, star-flecked potential.

Over time however I’ve come to recognize a subtle but important difference in the energy of the Dark Moon (where there is no Moon visible at all) and the New Moon (when a sliver of light appears, the leading edge of Diana’s bow), as well as how those two periods relate to the rest of the waxing phase.

When the Moon is completely dark I feel more of an urge to go inward than to cast magic or energy outward. I want to curl up in the roots of a tree and stare up through her leaves at the stars. It’s a moment of pause, like the actual event of death, the breath ceasing, the brain stilling. The month to be hasn’t drawn in its breath quite yet. Everything is balanced, waiting, empty. It’s the kind of darkness that can hold your dreams as well as your nightmares; it’s all in which shadows you peer into.

The Dark Moon is the time to dream. To plan. To make your lists, or just to take your desires and hopes to the Source and figure out where you’ll go next. Deep contemplation is needed here; the time for banishing work and decrease is done but it’s not quite time to get a move on.

As soon as that fingernail of light appears, the energy shifts. Time begins to move forward again with a relieved inhalation. That is the time to begin. Gather your jars, your candles; gather up your desires and toss them in big glittery handfuls to the wind, cast them into water, set them alight. As the Moon’s light waxes, the energy builds, starting with a few baby steps and, by the time the Moon is full, running full tilt, bare naked over the hills.

I think a lot of people gloss over the need to observe the Dark Moon. Going within, as many people are being forced to do right now, is hard for most of us. We’re afraid of the quiet, the dark – but nighttime holds up half the sky, and to jump from dusk to dawn is to miss a huge opportunity to explore our own interior landscape and just…sit still and shut up for a minute.

Sitting there in the dark (which is never fully dark, even on a cloudy night some light remains, just as in the brightest day something is casting a shadow) we can pick out our seeds and make sure we have the soil to plant them in. When the New Moon rises we can stick our fingers in the dirt and get those babies growing. Water will come; it always comes to the Moon.

If we try to think of our quarantime as its own sort of Dark Moon, the potential for change becomes clearer. I’m talking on a micro scale, on an individual basis, for those of us who have the time and privilege to tap into that potential rather than, say, spending 16 hour days on our feet in a hospital or working ourselves into tatters to keep house, teach children, police children, feed our families, work an 8 hour day in a chaotic house, and hopefully sleep in there somewhere. Not everyone has the luxury of choosing how to spend these weeks, but if you do, I highly recommend meditating on the spaces inside that mirror the spaces overhead.

Let’s see where this next cycle takes us.

10 Things I Love – Quarantine Edition

Posted on by Dianne Sylvan

I haven’t done a 10 Things I Love list in forever, but there are a lot of things I’ve discovered, or gotten to enjoy, because of shelter-at-home that I might never have gotten to otherwise so I thought I’d highlight a few of them.

Not everything on this list is COVID-19 adjacent; in some cases the timing is a total coincidence, but these are 10 things that have made plague life a bit more bearable.

1- Melissa Etheridge’s Daily At-Home Concerts

Usually about 20-30 minutes long, the shows feature a mix of her older songs (“Ruins,” OMG) and newer work as well as a lot of covers. Today’s was Piano Day, and she and her daughter Bailey did a cover of Coldplay’s “Fix You.” In my early 20s I was a huge ME fan, and it’s been a long time since I really listened to her, so her little concerts are really taking me back, in a lovely way, to my late 90s feminist rocker and singer-songwriter days.

Day 35!

Posted by Melissa Etheridge on Sunday, April 19, 2020

2 – Patrick Stewart’s Sonnet a Day

Patrick Stewart reading one of Shakespeare’s sonnets every day. That’s it. What more do you need?

3 – Niall Horan’s new album Heartbreak Weather

Not COVID related. I just love the album. My favorite songs on it are “Bend the Rules” and “Put a Little Love on Me,” but this is another one I adore, and the video features an adorable old couple who are…well, deeply weird.

4 – Having a Buzzcut

I already wrote an entire post about this, but just to keep you updated, I still LOVE IT. In fact I might ask my roommate to buzz it off even shorter.

5 – Blogging Again

Who’da thunk it – after a couple of years (maybe longer) of having no desire to blog suddenly I’m a 3x a week updater. What’s next, finishing that werewolf novel?

6 – An Amazon FireStick

For a long time I’ve wanted an Apple TV, the better to bring all my streaming together in one place; our Blu-Ray player runs several apps including Netflix and Prime, but I also wanted to be able to watch Disney+ on the big TV instead of just on my Macbook. It turned out that while Apple TVs start at like $129, I could get a FireStick for $50, and the day I was looking at them there was a coupon for half off that! It’s a much better interface than the one on the Blu-Ray as well, and much faster.

7 – Disney+

Speaking of which, I’m SO enjoying Disney+. Having almost their entire animated feature catalog at my fingertips is amazing (I am a longtime Disney lover, so much so that I very strongly considered trying to become an animator; my hand tremors and general insecurity about my artwork as well as the enormous price tag of CalArts changed my mind). Not only that but all the Star Wars movies, all the Marvel, and a load of Nat Geo documentaries to watch? We just watched a 3 parter on new discoveries made about the tomb of King Tut, and it was so fascinating! Not to mention Frozen 2 is currently my Self-Care Movie, so, being able to watch it over and over whenever I like is delightful.

8 – The mass effort by society to do something good

We’re in the middle of an unprecedented-in-our-time movement by millions of people to help protect not just their own families, but others they don’t even know. Certain authorities and perhaps 0.5% of the population (who will die for their god given right to TGIFridays, I guess) are trying to curtail that effort, but I sincerely doubt the Tangerine Twatwaffle is going to succeed while so many local governments are using actual facts and science instead of egomania and share prices to base decisions upon. Millions of us are staying home, at the risk of our livelihoods and social lives, to reduce the danger to others. We’re seeing a social movement I would not have given us credit for here in America to take care of each other, to reach out virtually and make sure people are getting supplies, and to continue having community even at a distance. We want, en masse, to do the right thing. How often does that happen anymore?

9 – Alton Brown’s Pantry Raid and Quarantine Quitchen videos

My favorite food nerd has taken to YouTube with a series of videos about pantry items and ways to get the most out of your stores; he and his wife (and their dog Scabigail) are also doing a cooking series together. A lot of them involve foods I wouldn’t eat, but they’re still fun.

10 – ChilledCow and ChilloutDeer on YouTube

Turns out I really love chillout, chillstep, and various lofi hiphop grooves. I find them weirdly both motivating for work and relaxing for evenings. ChilloutDeer‘s hourlong mixes in particular please me, but I can put on one of ChilledCow’s streams and just have it on all day while I work. Who doesn’t love finding new kinds of music to enjoy?

A COVID Confession

Posted on by Dianne Sylvan

I feel I need to admit something:

I’m scared.

Now, you are probably thinking to yourself, “No shit, Sherlock,” given the state of *waves frantically at the world* and the possibility of a) horrible illness and possible death, b) horrible illness and possible death for people I know and love, c) economic collapse that ensures people I care about will be in dire straits or already are, d) do I really need a fourth?

The odd thing is, the fear I’m experiencing is not focused on those things. It’s something much harder to define. I figured I would talk about it here because chances are I’m not the only one having this particular variety of fear and if you are too, I don’t want you to think you’re alone.

I’m afraid of life after COVID-19. I’m afraid of the world opening back up again. I’m afraid of going back to the office. Of eating at restaurants. Of things being “normal,” or whatever “normal” is at that point.

Part of me wants nothing in this world more than the chance to go to the Alamo Drafthouse again – to eat giant soft pretzels and drink booze in a darkened theater packed with people, where everyone is laughing and gasping at the same thing. Shared experiences! Parties! Dinners out with friends! Church services! My Thursday coffee date! Sitting in Starbucks pretending to write!

Another part of me never wants to leave the house again. Wants to stay in a circumscribed little life in here and let the world keep falling to shit out there.

Out there everything is awful. It’s been awful for a long time now. In here isn’t really that much better to be honest – I can still see news, still hear about the awfulness, still read Twitter for five minutes and want to commit five felonies.

But in here my life is tiny and manageable. It’s days and days of sameness. Work, sleep, eat, watch a thing, read a thing, shower, sleep more. Do all of that again. I go shopping at most once a week. I know a lot of people are finding that utterly maddening, but I’ve been…fine.

I mentioned in a previous post that before all this began I was expanding my world. I’d started making friends at church, was joining groups and attending events. After years of smallness I was reaching out…and now I’m not, and part of me is SO RELIEVED.

It’s almost like time has stopped for a while and as soon as the world starts turning again so will time. The utter catastrofuckery of the coming election will loom even larger. I’ll feel like I have to address the goals I set for 2020 that I haven’t made a whit of progress on so far. I’ll have to deal with…everything. Right now I’m hidden away in my tower watching the world through a screen. I don’t have to touch it. I feel worry and sadness for people risking their lives on the front lines, and I feel the weight of so much death, but it’s not about me personally. It’s a tragedy I try to help with when and how I can, but I feel insulated in a way, cloistered.

Now the thing about it is, there’s not much I can do about that. Staying home and being isolated is kind of how you help right now. It’s literally the thing to do. Or not do. It’s not like I can just up and decide to be a nurse! And remembering the last few days at the office before I was sent home, the stress and worry all around me was giving me panic attacks and making me physically ill. Getting back out into that does not seem like a good use of my strengths.

I’m not judging myself for any emotion that I do or don’t feel – there’s no road map for any of this and everyone has their own way of dealing. Instead I’m trying to just observe them, let them do their thing without trying to squelch or magnify any particular feeling. I’m just trying to hold my own space and learn from all of this.

It is however distressing to feel this way. I don’t want to live small, but I also don’t want to go insane.

The societal fallout of the pandemic is going to be studied for decades. Psychologists, sociologists, every kind of -ogist out there will have things to say about the strange tangle of contradictory feelings that seems to be afflicting all of us right now. I imagine that prescriptions for antidepressants and anxiety meds will skyrocket (they probably have already) and the mental health needs of people working in health care and other essential industries will be paramount. (Well, okay, this being the US there will probably be fuck-all resources made available given how little this country cares about mental health, but in OTHER countries where the governments give a damn about the well being of their citizens that care will be paramount.)

It’s hard to say what long-term effects all this will have on me as an individual or society as a whole. Chances are a lot of effort will be spent to try and sweep it all under the rug and just get back to the deeply problematic world we knew.

I don’t want that.

Do you?

Hair Today…

Posted on by Dianne Sylvan

I’ve always wanted to shave my head.

I should preface this by saying I’m not overly precious about my hair. It’s been every length and configuration I’ve ever felt like trying. It’s been dyed and permed and bits of it bleached, pixie-short, or down the middle of my back. Bangs, no bangs, layers, bob, everything but dreadlocks or blonde. I’ll have it short for a long while and then something in me will think, “It would be sexier/Witchier/younger looking long,” and I start growing it out.

Once I passed forty, however, I began to understand why my mother always said women over 35 should not have long hair. It’s not a question of “should,” to me, it’s a question of “Dear god, WHY?”

I spent the last year or so letting my hair grow out, and it was shoulder-length and making me insane. My hair is extremely thick; when it’s long it’s heavy, hot, and won’t really do anything. It eats shampoo. It takes a full day to dry.

To quote an age-old meme, ain’t nobody got time for that.

Every time I cut it off I revel in the freedom I feel. A part of me always mourns, I think, because that weird idea I have that youth and attractiveness are long-hair qualities persists, even though I gave up on the whole idea of attracting male attention back in my 30s when I realized a) I don’t really like cishet men as a social class, and although there are plenty of really great individual guys, I just don’t have the energy and b) given how I look the kind of male attention I tend to attract is not the kind I want. Still, part of me feels like I’m “giving up” on myself every time I cut my hair off, a lot like how giving the finger to the weight-cycling industry was “letting myself go.”

Then I take that first shower with a new pixie cut and I remember fuck all that.

Periodically throughout the years when it’s gotten too long I’ve said, “I should just shave it all off.”

As I said in a previous post, enter COVID-19.

I had recently gotten a regrettable haircut. I was hating it. There was no way I could get it taken care of within at least a month, and my hair grows very quickly. The thought of spending weeks of shelter-in-place loathing my hair was dismaying.

Then I remembered my roommate has clippers for the dog.

(They’re human hair clippers, she just uses them on her dogs from time to time. I think she used to use them on her ex-husband too, which, let’s not go down that path.)

You know where this is going.

I now have less than half an inch of hair all over my head, and I have to say, I love it. It’s fun to rub my hands over. It dries almost instantly. It uses less than a dime-sized sploot of shampoo. It’s going to be difficult for me to let it start growing when I go back out in to the working world…and I may not bother. I am fuzzy and round like a hedgehog. I find this utterly delightful in a time when delight is much trickier to come by.

Don’t mind the ears. They’re detachable.

Even so, I stare at it in the mirror and I have a lot of complicated feelings. I see all the patchy grey mixed into my natural mouse-brown, whole swaths of razed landscape that look like they’ve been burned to ash and are waiting to fly away in the wind. I consider dyeing it, but I feel like leaving it natural for a bit, to look at myself in a rawer form. I am acutely aware of how round my face is and how small my head looks compared to my body. My eyes somehow look brighter. Occasional moments of “what the hell have I DONE?” fade into an odd sort of affection toward myself, as if with a buzzcut everything I’ve been through in life is visible, if only to me, and every prickly patch of grey is a battle scar. There is a fierce femininity in having so little hair, which I was not expecting, and also the feeling that I’ve shed some sort of armor that wasn’t protecting so much as concealing me.

The fact that I’m having this sort of experience while everything is in this lurching state of turmoil and transition is both too much and exactly enough. I feel like for a lot of us this whole strange era has stripped away a lot of the artifice and distraction that made our lives what they were. Americans in particular are dreadful at silence and stillness. The minute we have to face the sort of emotions that are coming up for us all right now, we dive into distractions – only nowadays there are fewer of those, and after you’ve baked bread and done a silly dance video for TikTok and watched all the seasons of Parks and Rec again, in the end you literally can’t get away from yourself. A lot of the funny stuff online is people trying desperately not to be still. What happens when all of that noise and busy-ness and “productivity” is unavailable?

I imagine for a lot of people it feels very similar to shaving their heads.

My suggestion? Learn to love the fuzz. It’s going to take a while for it all to grow back…assuming, by then, you still want it to.

Okay and Not Okay

Posted on by Dianne Sylvan

The sky is just so blue.

Spring is happening in Texas even though nobody is really watching; the Earth needs neither our permission nor our attention to do what She does best. The bluebonnets have come up, blanketing the roadsides even though so few cars fly by. Trees have exploded into flower, which even sheltering in place we Austinites are acutely aware of as the pollen count makes life miserable just like it does every year. My car’s hood is coated with bright green oak pollen. There suddenly seem to be bugs everywhere. We might not have any idea what day of the week it is but we all know it’s Spring.

Rainy days are hard, stuck inside, weather and mood sliding into a grey puddle on the ground. The gravity of what’s happening presses down and leaves me feeling pinned to the floor. On sunny days it all seems much more manageable, even if all I do is look out the window at a world of crazy-vibrant greens and oh, the blue sky.

I avoid the news.

It started as a twice-a-day limit – I’d let myself check local news ONLY in the morning and at night. But enough of the national idiocy creeps in – those circle-jerk “press conferences,” catastrophe profiteering, completely unnecessary shortages of equipment and supplies. God, how we must look to the rest of the world. I know what it looks like from in here, and it’s so enraging, so depressing, I can’t deal with it anymore. So, for now, I stop clicking on links. I mute words and users all over the place. I have to stay sane. My meds are holding me together really well and I’m not risking that just to spend my days and nights poisonously angry at everything.

I am not a productive quarantista or whatever the nonsense influencer parlance is these days. I am not making progress on any of my projects, and in fact I’ve stopped even looking at them. I’m not learning a language, I’m not taking up a new hobby, I’m not forcing myself into extra productivity when productivity obsession is part of how we got here. If I feel like making or doing something, I do it; if I feel like sleeping the day away, I do that. I am working from home with my day job which gives me both a paycheck and some structure to my days, and I am grateful for both of those things. I realize what a privilege it is not to be terrified about money right now.

I am also grateful that I don’t have children. Sweet lord.

There are no rules, no proper reaction to something unprecedented. You can’t screw up something that’s never happened before. There’s no right way; there’s only the way that gets us through.

We’re all grieving what we knew and doing the best we can and maybe for you that means baking sourdough or learning guitar, but for me it means…well, apparently it means blogging again, ordering cold brew by the gallon, and listening to lofi hip hop radio – beats to study/chill to on Youtube. Next week it might mean finally starting a morning yoga practice or rereading the Harry Potter books. I have no idea. I’m pretty sure it’ll involve naps regardless.

A seedling pushing up through the soil has no idea what the world looks like. It doesn’t know what it’s getting into. Will there be enough rain? Will the sun be too harsh here and burn it to a crisp before it’s six inches tall? Is this a sidewalk crack or a meadow? The only way to know is to move toward the unknown. None of us really know what the world is going to look like when we poke our faces out again. We just have to take it one painful, scary inch at a time, and as Anna sings in Frozen 2, “Just do the next right thing.”