This article was first published on the author’s blog here.
Lockdown 3.0 extension
This Sunday morning was unusually awful. I had an acute headache and was feeling low. Weekends are usually the best ones but for a couple of months, it’s not the same anymore. Maybe, I have never been used to this before. Or maybe, no one is used to this. Everyone is trying to adjust or live with the ‘normal’. The mental clock was ticking. The night before was also quite anxiously spent rolling from one side to the other, watching some random episodes from the most favourite F.R.I.E.N.D.S series. Picked up my phone to have a WhatsApp conversation with friends but I refrained from having this conversation, thinking self-talk might help like it does every time. The clock played its own game and with that, I struggled to sleep. I tried with the earplugs playing my favourite “go-to-sleep” playlist. Nothing worked out. I kept wondering why this is happening. I registered that sometimes, all you need to do is just keep everything aside, empty your mind, let everything out, and relax. Okay, that helped. Finally, I slept and had a good sleep without any nightmares.
Lockdown 4.0
I wanted to check my phone but the heart and brain had their own play. Finally, I picked up the phone and the notification showed up the “Lockdown 3.0 extension”. A gush of thoughts started pouring in, what’s next? It has almost been 2 months that I haven’t seen my close ones – friends, colleagues, hogged my favourite eatery spots and travelled to places in the bucket list. And like everyone and everything else, even I miss all of these. And this has been bothering me for a long time now. Still, catching up on video calls with friends, voice calls, daily conversations makes everything seem normal for a while. But this is not the ‘normal’ we all wished for, right? Continuously, I have been diverting my mind into work and other things but it is disturbing. The bare truth is that the new ‘normal’ sucks and it will take some more time to sink in.
Are you okay?
There are days when everything is not okay. I am not okay. I do not feel like doing anything. My body and mind give up completely. I do not feel like sleeping. Working or taking up the daily chores. Talking. Taking calls. Then I take up my diary, start penning down all the thoughts running in a loop just like a song on auto-play. But then, I fail there too. I then take up something new to engage myself in. Slowly, I start to register that I have been drifting away from people and the life around. There are days when there are fewer conversations, even scrolling Instagram sucks. Badly! So does scrolling through the photo gallery on my phone or WhatsApp chats. Maybe this is the new ‘Social Distancing’ none of us ever wished for but comes free with the new ‘normal’. There’s a constant fear of missing out I could see it, sense it. This is infuriating. Everything. All of it.
Everything that has been going around and inside is affecting many of us in some way or the other.
My phone buzzed and one of my friends dropped in a message to check on me. Eyes moist. There is a bottle of emotions that I am afraid to open up, a bubble of thoughts that is ready to burst anytime which would choke me up. It was quite hard but I gathered the courage to have this conversation. And to my surprise, he was feeling the same. We discussed more about our mental states. The bubbles burst. Thoughts and fears exchanged.
The same day I had this conversation with another friend of mine, she shared the same. It looks like I am not the only one stuck in this puddle. I can recall my friend saying that she has logged off from social media because that takes a mental toll on her. There are many like us. I am grateful for the chance I got to speak up and listen.
It is okay to not be okay, especially right now.
This article is written by Ruchi Yevle, who is a software developer and a writer at Thethoughtgasm who seeks solace between code and quotes and stories that connect. She is an old school soul with a heart of handwritten letters and fresh flowers.
👏👏awesome writing …..