Morning melons & pandemic mood swings

I had one of my random minor pandemic-era meltdowns today. Have you been having those too?

Today is my Saturday. I got nine hours of sleep, cut up a melon for breakfast, and then the listless feeling overtook me. Almost all of the time I feel fine, often quite well indeed, but spurts of low-grade depression hit me randomly: days (or more realistically, hours) when all my usual desire to savor and do and enjoy feels crushed out of me, and nothing seems particularly worth enjoying. 

I get stuck thinking about what is not right - I miss my home,* I’m tired of being inside, I have a family member going on a plane soon, TMJ pain is radiating from my ear today, I’m tired of cooking, I’m tired of working…

I put myself in a half-full bathtub with an old issue of the lovely Womankind magazine. It’s not really bath weather; I keep feeling sweat trickling down my belly and have to follow it up with a cool shower. My girlfriend steps away from final exam preparations, puts on her pancake music playlist and dances goofily at me for the entirety of “Little Bitty Pretty One” to see if she can make me smile.

She also suggests that if she felt bad, she might like to spend the afternoon naked in bed with a coloring book. I settle for curling up on top of the covers with my laptop and a container of morning melon left over from less despairing times.

I open Twitter, see the news and trends sidebar, hear the wheels in my head start screeching against each other, and decide to go find a Firefox extension to remove it from my view of the website. That change cheers me up a bit immediately. I find another extension to file away all the tabs I have open, which have been overwhelming me with silent cries of you should have read this/printed this/done something with this already. My browser now clean of should vibes, I take refuge in some blog reading, and notice that soon I have energy to bake up something small for lunch while watching Call the Midwife.

I love a mindful moment. I also have seen distraction work so well as a mental health tactic to not believe that sometimes it’s a good one. Sometimes a little bit of time just has to pass in which my gloomy or anxious convictions are suspended from wearing deeper tracks into my brain - and I’ll find that they dissipate while I'm not watching.

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*I have been sheltering in place at my girlfriend’s since late March, which is - let’s see - coming up on five months. It’s not so much that I moved, as that I am currently not living at home. I miss my personal lair, my belongings, and the home-centered things that I can only do there.