Making myself try to write is not working. I’ve gone down pretty hard. My body and mind want to do as little as possible. Things I have to do are not getting done, let alone things I want to do.

Yesterday, I sat staring at the shelf where I keep my beads for about an hour. I thought about making a pretty necklace for myself, which is something fun that I like doing. And I just sat there and thought until I finally forgot about making the necklace.

Who is here with me? I know this virus is doing strange things to people. My best friend is not sleeping. My husband’s anxiety is high and he is trying to micro-manage the cats. (Cats resist micromanagement pretty well.)

Every day, I try to break out of it. But it is so hard to get up and do something – or even sit here and do something in the case of writing.

I want to:

• Write
• Go outside and garden
• Plant the mail-order plants that are sitting around my house
• Go outside and sit in one spot and pick up all the gumballs within my reach
• Make banana bread
• Make that necklace
• Eat food that I do not grab as a single piece from the kitchen
• Wash the windows so I can look at outside without thinking what a louse housekeeper I am
• Look up the Netflix password so I can watch Netflix after the system reset itself when I had the cable disconnected
• Paint my nails
• Shower
• Crochet
• Cross Stitch

The bar is not high.

What I am doing:

• Reading (a lot)
• Playing World of Warcraft (64th level elven hunter)
• Teaching my best friends kids 3 mornings a week
• Sleeping
• Petting the cats
• Doing fake cross-stitch on my Kindle
• Creating clothes-mountain
• Cleaned the toilet
• Going on drives to nowhere just so I can see different things
• Reading more news about Covid-19 than is probably healthy

But know, if you are going through this, you are not alone. I know it is trauma but it sure doesn’t feel like traumas in the past. This is the slow creeping trauma. Trauma that whispers from the deeps like an Elder God in a Lovecraft story. By the time we see it for what it is, it has been already happening for a long while. It’s settled into our bodies and our homes without us realizing it.

Now that it’s in, it is harder to remove. If we could have seen it coming, we could have actively stopped it. But we could not see it coming. It entered in a tendril here, a puff there, a news article, a Facebook post, one twisting bit of dread at a time.

At least I am not my neighbor who is fanatically and constantly mowing his lawn. I think that would be worse – but he is at least getting some exercise.