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Everyone I have talked to about this is emotionally unravelling the last several weeks. Me included. But I'm a sort of one-man diagnostic, because I love winter and find it comforting, so the time of year and weather shouldn't be a factor for me.
My guess is that approaching the official one-year mark of the pandemic (personally, I consider that mid-March when the shutdown really took off) is a huge psychological weight: we've been living like this for a YEAR and we're not remotely at the end of it.
Weather is an indirect factor (even for me, I suppose) because the warmer weather that let us safely and comfortably see people outdoors is a long way off for much of Canada, so I suspect isolation is much worse.
Whatever your specific diagnosis of the fault, the slow, uneven, unreliable arrival and administration of vaccines is a huge issue emotionally. That is the only real hope of getting out of this, and that now feels either a very long way off or precarious.
And related to that, the emergence of variants of the virus and the steady trickle of news about whether various vaccines will or won't protect against them feels like we could be back to square one with just a few twists of bad luck. That is soul-destroying.
Personally—not sure if parents in Toronto want to hear this—I thought the return to school would rebalance a lot. I don't talk about my kids or family publicly, but suffice to say, whatever is dragging everyone down isn't erased by school, though it's certainly a LOT better.
I don't know what form this is taking for everyone else, but I feel two overriding and almost conflicting things: everything is so HARD—practically, emotionally, everything—right now. And every day and week feel exactly the same, so there's nothing to lighten it.
And NO ONE wants to hear about anyone else's new fabulous routine—seriously, no one wants to hear that, stop chirping about it—but I've been doing yoga every day since early January. And I STILL feel like this. So, I guess, it could be even worse. But I'm just done.
This is so ridiculous and earnest, forgive me. But a friend went to one of those paint night events in early December and did a painting with the line "A thrill of hope..." from O Holy Night. The line, in isolation, really struck me.
At the time, vaccines had just started landing on snowy tarmacs, months ahead of when we were told our best possible hope was. My kids were in daycare and school, as happy and balanced as they'd been in months. Working from the basement was okay!
Things seemed genuinely hopeful for the first time in almost a year, like the curve of the whole narrative might finally start to turn upward. I made a note to myself to maybe file some kind of "thrill of hope" column right before Christmas, riffing on some of this.
And now, I'm just done. Just wrung out, hollow inside. I've started doing a thing I never, ever do with the news, which is chanting "Shutupshutupshutup" whenever I see a terrifying story about one of the variants: I am a child with my fingers in my ears because I just can't.
Anyway, none of this was meant to be about my personal whining, I swear. More just an anecdotal sense that everyone has hit a wall in the last month, and trying to make some sense of why that's kicking in now. If you have thoughts, I'm all ears.
ANYWAY, I loathe "good vibes only" garbage. But on the off chance that you also just need something silly and excellent for a moment, I give you my go-to: cats puking to techno music.
