Hello, lovely readers! I hope you’re all staying well and healthy out there, wearing masks diligently and being very careful. These days I always feel more and more like I’m quoting a Jane Austen novel when I talk to people, since I’m always asking after their health. So, what have I been doing recently, since COV is the party guest that just won’t leave? I’ve still been at home on family medical leave with my husband, who’s still recovering from his stroke. Recently he’s had Botox injections in his arm and leg, and it seems to really help his spasticity there a lot. But there’s still a long way to go. We stick very close to home, apart from rehab appointments and doctor’s visits, but we’re both painfully aware that it wouldn’t take much to get unlucky and get infected. I’m hoping like crazy our luck holds until a vaccine is available in the far-flung future. I just want to get us both to 2021 in one piece.
Meanwhile, in between doing helpful things for Matt, I’ve been making more masks for loved ones. Cooking a lot. Cleaning a lot, but never enough, really. I’m investing more time and energy for things to put in the webshop. I’ve been absorbing Youtube tutorials and lectures to keep my mind busy. But I’m avoiding things like restarants and bars like, well, the plague. Can you blame me? Every time I see the numbers go up from a bunch of partiers at a bar or another spreading event, I end up muttering, “Oh nooooo, so much no; every single no!” to myself. It’s much better to sit on the back patio with a spindle and some wool, and just have a quiet time spinning and keeping Matt company. After all that time apart in the hospital, I appreciate his presence even more than I did before he got sick and before all this happened.
And there’s the occasional Zoom chat with people. One of the most recent was a friend of a friend offering a lecture about how to deal with “fear as an entrepreneur”. I decided to give it a shot, since I have a (painfully small and wee) business and could always use good advice, but it was a terrible trainwreck. It started out reasonable, if somewhat canned, elitist and a bit disorganized, until one of the guest speakers started ranting about how “masks don’t really work; they’re just there to comfort people, and also criminals are using them to hide their faces during their criminal acts!” I couldn’t facepalm hard enough as I quickly hit “leave session” as speedily as I could. Funny enough, it didn’t really help me with my fears of keeping income coming during a pandemic, and gave me an extra fear of that anti-mask lady who’s out there probably picking fights at Kowalski’s and spraying rage-spit all over the produce.So, not as helpful as I had hoped, alas. Plus, the whole tone of the meeting was oddly dismissive of fear, the way people can be if they feel like nothing really bad is ever going to affect them personally.
Honestly, I feel like fear has it’s lessons to teach. Fear makes you pay attention to your surroundings. Fear makes you think hard about your actions. Fear makes you vigilant about consequences. Fear makes you appreciate what you have, while you have it. I feel as long as you can embrace fear as a friend with something important to tell you, it’s not something that needs banishing or something that makes you weak or cowardly. I really wish the Zoom meeting had covered some of that. (To be fair, maybe it did, after I noped out during the ranting. But somehow I doubt it.)
I scream. You scream. We all scream. Because we’re all still pretty freaked out about everything happening around us, every single day. But it’s okay to be afraid. That just means we’re paying attention. And if we are, that gives us all a better chance to get through to the next day, and the next, and the one after that. And that’s useful, in it’s odd way. Also, take a break. Get out some yarn and play with it. Draw something stupid. Take a nap. Make a cup of tea you like. Let your fear make you pay attention to the things you love…
And when we all get to the other side of all this craziness, I am hugging you all so very hard…