jkatkina

The irony of getting hit with a bug after that last post --

Anyways, I've lost most of this week to a mean little flu. 38C fever, all the body aches, nose like a facuet. I'm picking away at this post in an attempt to focus on something concrete for a while, though I expect it'll take the day (or a couple of days).

(It wasn't COVID, ostensibly. I took four tests, all negative. Who fucking knows, though; certainly I'm wading through worsened brain-fog right now but that may just be normal flu recovery.)

Focus is an issue. Particularly with creative stuff.

( navel gazing about that here )

Some days I struggle with self-isolation, but it's interesting: it's the same way I struggle with weekend days without plans even when the world isn't ending. There's a pattern to it: I get up, sit around on the computer, feel unable to do anything active or productive, and just spiral down from there into frustration and anger and feelings of self-worthlessness. Or I am gentle with myself and let myself do nothing, and I.... do nothing. I end the day feeling groggy and a little bit gummy.

Or on days when I actually get things done, I struggle with the manic sense of "today's a GODO DAY gotta KEEP DOING THINGS while I can". I'm getting better at letting go of that, but it really feels like some quirk of my psychology has set it up so that I just can't win.

Part of it is that there's a little, tiny extra barrier-of-entry to doing anything creative when there's someone else physically in the room with me (or on bad days, in the house with me at all). I feel obliged to keep track of the emotional state of anyone I'm with, just a little bit -- and then also, I feel like if I start doing anything, I'm going to get interrupted, which is an immediate frustration spike. The thing is, this is true; I get interrupted a lot when I'm with other people. It's all well-meaning, but it deeply constrains what I can feel safe doing with my time.

I'm sure this is a problem other people have conquered. It's a deeply banal human issue, exacerbated by anxiety and circumstance. Not everyone struggles with it, but boy howdy, do I.

I guess quarantine hasn't really changed my day-to-day all that much, except to make it more of itself. Go figure.

I’ve fallen into the delightfully stereotypical habit of going to coffee shops to write. This is in part because my city has some really gorgeous and chill coffee shops — you throw a stone, you hit a coffee shop. They’re only outpaced by sushi joints, which means there’s one (or several) to suit anyone’s tastes. Often, but not always, TL and I go on these excursions together; it’s lovely, it feels like old times.

In other part this is because, during the time I was trying to balance freelance and working part-time at the print shop, I got into some bad habits at home. The computer room in our apartment has had some bad juju since we moved in, and I kind of made it worse by spending a lot of depressed, frightened, paralyzed days trying to do work in there. It’s hard to get anything done there even now, when I’m working full-time in a good creative job. This got really bad over the holidays: I fell full-force back into the same miserable paralysis I thought I had escaped. It was kind of a wake-up call, but I’m still mulling over how to emotionally disinfect the space (and get my head back on straight, to boot).

Thus, in the meantime, coffee shops! It’s that or fall off the horse entirely with writing, which I’m unwilling to do. It’s not the kindest on the wallet, but hell if it isn’t cheaper than renting a studio space.