Sorry I haven’t been posting regularly. See, writing a blog, even a short one about happy things, costs me some number of productivity spoons; and I find that I have fewer productivity spoons left to me these days.

(By the way: if you’re not aware of spoon theory, here’s a visual. Read more here.)

This has been a shift for me, because I don’t normally run out of spoons. Well, I do, but I have a lot to spend, most days. I spend a lot of them at work, but I can still usually do a few things in the evening; I can go to the gym; I can go to the grocery store and make dinner; I can sometimes do a task for school, like set up a lesson for the next day. I can almost always get something written even on a school night, if it’s not one of the times in the school year when I’m burnt and exhausted and hate everything. And on the weekends, I can usually spend the entire time working, on grading, or chores, or my writing.

Life’s a lot easier when you don’t have a chronic disease or the weight of mental health concerns.

But my usual easy productivity has not been with me for the last month. Now I have to count my spoons.

It’s remarkable, and I wasn’t prepared for it. I really thought I would be able to do extra things: I thought I would be able to get extra writing done, since I don’t have to spend as much time at work; I thought I would be able to provide extra emotional support to my friends and family — and my students. The first week or two I was throwing around offers to help in any way I could; I suppose I’m lucky that nobody really took me up on it, because if I had had to spend my energy doing extra tasks for others, I’m not sure what I would have had to drop. I was angry with myself for the first couple of weeks: why was I so tired? And if I was so tired, why wasn’t I sleeping? Why wasn’t I getting more things done?

It didn’t really dawn on me at first that the answers were in some of the questions, and all I had to do was put the pieces together: I am tired because I’m not sleeping, and because everything I do — everything — is harder. I’m not sleeping for the same reason that everything is harder: because I am constantly afraid, constantly anxious, constantly trying to find something to do to solve the problem — and constantly aware that I cannot solve this problem. And of course, the more I worry, the less I sleep, and then I have less energy to do things, including worry, but worrying is never the thing I let go of in order to do other stuff: I worry first, and then whatever energy I have left over goes to my job and my daily tasks. I spend more energy getting mad at myself for not getting more done during the day, and because I’m tired and on edge, and I struggle with my temper, I am constantly getting mad at anything and everything around me. And then I feel bad because my family has to walk on eggshells around me so that I don’t snap at them. And there’s some more energy spent, and even less accomplished.

I get it now, I understand; I’m still not dealing with it well, though. I still get angry with myself for not doing more. It’s weird: somehow I still feel pressure to use this extra free time before it runs out, like I find myself thinking that I should do more writing or record more podcasts before the quarantine is over and I have to start going out and doing things more. Like this is a vacation.

But that’s not what this is. This is a natural disaster.

I’ve been through a few of those: a hurricane and more than one blizzard in Massachusetts; a wildfire in California; a flood in Oregon. None of them on the scale of Hurricane Katrina or Maria, or the Loma Prieta or Northridge earthquakes. But they were bad enough to show me what a natural disaster feels like: you watch things fall apart that you had always counted on; you watch danger arise from a direction and in a way that you never expected; you watch that danger come for you, or for those you love: and there’s nothing you can do. Except realize what you are about to lose. And realize you have no idea what to do if and when you lose it, how you will get it back, how you will live without it.

That’s what this is. Covid-19 has taken away things we never expected to lose, and we are in danger of losing even more, if we haven’t already lost everything. And I am aware of how lucky I am to be able to say that I have not lost everything. I see people on social media who have, and I can’t — no, I was going to say I can’t imagine what that would feel like; but I can imagine. That’s a lot of what I do during the day. I imagine what I could lose, and how it would feel, and what I would do about it. And every time I think about, what if I lose someone I love, or what if I lose my job and my home, I realize: there’s nothing I could do about it. I assume I’d adapt and survive, I assume I’d be able to ask for and receive some help; but I don’t know. I just don’t know. I know I couldn’t fix the problem, couldn’t recover the loss. I know I’d be devastated. I don’t know how I’d deal with it. Maybe I wouldn’t be able to. I worry about all of it.

That’s why I can’t get much writing done. Not even happy little blogs: because it turns out that I need to feel happy before I can post happy things; or at least, I need to be close enough to happy to recognize what would be a good happy thing to post. I can write things that  I’m not actually feeling in the moment, but when I try to think up a good topic, or when I try to pick a good link to share, if I’m feeling down or exhausted or angry or afraid, nothing seems like a good idea. Which I also get mad at myself for, by the way. So that’s fun.

This is what it feels like to have to count your spoons. To have a chronic illness, or a mental health condition like anxiety or depression. It feels like nothing works right. And I suspect that you always feel like it’s your fault, like if you could only deal with it better, be smarter, more thoughtful and aware and organized, then everything would be better. Though maybe people who deal with this all the time are smarter about it than I am, maybe they know that they can’t blame themselves for something that’s outside of their control. All I know is that that thought doesn’t help me. Knowing that I can’t do anything about it doesn’t keep me from worrying about it. About anything. Knowing that it’s not my fault doesn’t keep me from getting angry at myself.

I even have that little annoying thing that clearly isn’t the main issue, but keeps popping up and irritating me, because it’s kind of a pain and it’s clearly connected to the larger problems, so when the little irritation pops into my consciousness, it makes me think of the bigger issues, which sets me on edge; at the same time, I can’t believe I also have to deal with that little fucking thing that just won’t go away. I have eczema, you see. On my hands. They itch. And then the skin dries out, and splits, and hurts. And itches more. It’s made worse by repeated hand washing, and by stress, so. Fucking annoying. I feel bad bitching about it, because people are dealing with things that are a thousand times worse, but that only makes it more irritating, because goddammit, my hands itch, and maybe I should be Zen enough to rise above it, but I can’t, and I feel lame and I wish I could just make it stop but I can’t control anything but I can still worry about it.

And around and around we go. Using up our spoons. And getting nothing done.

This wasn’t even the blog I was going to write; I was going to write about my students. And part of me thinks I should add that right here, right now, make the point I was actually going to make; but you know what? I don’t want to spend the spoons. I need to call my dad, and I want to maybe record a chapter of the book I’m reading to my students for their distance learning English class. So I think I will stop here, and write about my students tomorrow. Or maybe the next day.

I’m grateful, honestly, that I’ve had this experience, because I think I get it now, what it is like to have to count your spoons. I’ve been able to sympathize with the people I know who have to do it, but I could never empathize. Now I think I can. But I also realize: if this disaster, and the weight of the worry that I’ve been carrying around for a month now, have reduced my formerly unlimited number of spoons to some number I have to count: what has it done to people who had to count their spoons in the first place?

And the scariest thing of all is: what if this doesn’t stop? I mean, that’s what it’s like to have a chronic illness: you have to recognize that the situation will, or at least may, be permanent. You’ll always have to count your spoons, forever. I  won’t have to face that, at least not with the current pandemic; it may take a year for things to get back to normal-ish, but there will be a vaccine, and things will improve; I don’t know how long the economic damage will last, but I know it won’t be forever. But for some people, the changes  wrought by this disaster will be permanent. And maybe they will be for me, too. Or if that doesn’t happen with this disaster, maybe it will happen with a future one. At some point, I will have to face and deal with a permanent loss, a reduction in my capacities and abilities, a change in my life, that will never get better. And then another one, and then another one.

I think, between now and then, and using what I have learned and what I am going through now, I have to learn to accept that loss, that reduction, that change, and keep going forward with what I have left to me. I’m sure I can do it; I know everybody does. We deal with loss for as long as we live. I hope I am learning how. I hope the learning helps.