the before

One of the side effects (or main effects?) of so many months of pandemic, quarantine, aloneness, and political upheaval is stress.

Capital-S stress.

It's constant.

Nobody is sleeping. I'm up at 2 or 3 am most nights, for a time. I turn on a light and do crosswords, until I'm bleary-eyed enough to fall back into restless sleep.

The mundane greeting "how are you?" is unanswerable.

Grocery stores are once again low on toilet paper and cleaners. Many bars and restaurants closed again too, for at least 4 weeks. 

Yesterday a friend wondered how we'll go back to some kind of normal, where there isn't a constant cycle of breaking, always-shitty news, where we aren't fear-scrolling Twitter every ten minutes and messaging WTF and OMG to each other. (Some days, when the news is really bad, you don't even need a qualifier. Just the exclamation. Like the day RBG died. We all know what the onslaught of OMG's meant.)

We theorized that, if and when there are better times, we could all do shrooms or drop acid for a week, in an attempt to re-set our over-stressed, cortisol-ridden brains and nervous systems.

*

I read Carolyn Hax's Friday chat on Washingtonpost.com. She's a sensible advice-giver and talks frequently about the Before and the Now.

It's a form of radical acceptance, I think. We don't have to like the Now. We can seek to change it. But accepting it will help us deal with it right now.