This morning I was feeling pretty low, the way you do when you wake up knowing you ate too many biscuits the night before. I am usually very disciplined about food and fitness but this has not been the best week for that. It has been a week much like this funny image someone shared on Facebook of what I think of as a Very Hungry Author, credit ScaryMommy. (Vegetarian version of course.)
I am also a very goals driven person and I think what has been especially hard is feeling as though I’m not progressing on any goals. This feels like just marking time: waiting for life to restart. Waiting to make plans, waiting to make progress, waiting for the peak for the crisis to pass, waiting to see what the aftermath looks like.
It is so hard to write right now. And although I’ve been trying, it is tough going. I think the particular difficulty has to do with the fact I’ve been working for two years on my master work and now I’m worried it feels irrelevant to the post coronavirus world. Will anyone even want it? And before you ask, no I can’t just put a reference to the virus into it, it doesn’t work that way, it grew organically out of a pre virus world. And the nature of the book is such, I can’t avoid the topic without essentially saying, this book is set in an alternate universe.
So anyway, I know it’s a first world problem. But these are these are the kind of issues I have. I know I’m very lucky in this current situation, it could be and is a lot worse for lots of people than me. My issues are things like difficulty writing, and missing my gym routine and the personal training I was going to have. And worrying that I am losing my disciplined grip on my own lifestyle. And I was feeling sad.
I am now feeling more cheerful. The first reason is that i had a lovely video call with my dearest Mum, both of us still in our PJs and she did a really good job of cheering me up by agreeing that it does indeed suck and also telling me funny stories about her memoirs, which I am looking forward to reading. Also, I did the washing up while we talked, so at least that is done.
Then my partner also had a go at cheering me up by pointing out that I have actually made progress against at least one goal. I have now taught six Zumba classes online and teaching Zumba was one of my New Year’s Resolutions. And, as I’ve blogged about before, I wouldn’t have had the courage to start teaching as soon as I have if it wasn’t for the pandemic which put smaller anxieties into proportion. So that is one area in which I have made progress and continue to make it.
And I also do accept, because it’s what I’d tell anyone else, that just keeping going counts as progress right now. Everything is very hard, everything is stressful, everything is overwhelming. It takes strength just to keep your old life ticking over. Today I am a caterpillar, munching through one leaf at a time (and maybe too many chocolate biscuits) but someday I will be a social butterfly again.