What Quarantine Looks Like

May 2020

I like people.  When I write in my Five-Minute Journal each morning, almost every morning under the heading, What would make today great, I have something like, connect with a friend/student/colleague/neighbor/kid.  A roommate once told me that my biggest flaw as a roommate was using the phone too much -- this was before the era of individual cell phones.  When I go on walks here at home, I often go with a friend in my neighborhood or I call a girlfriend, making the walk a visit. 

There's Whitman's poem "The Noiseless, Patient Spider."  That spider just keeps spinning its webs to try to connect, to make the web catch again and again, to make it hold, to make it hook onto meaning.  The spider wants connection and purpose and fulfillment.  

Sometimes I feel like that spider, wanting and needing connection.  But.  But I am, in so many ways, delighted not to be driving to work every morning and interacting face-to-face with colleagues and teenagers and anyone else all day long.  Working with teenagers -- reading with them and doing Latin with them and just chatting with them -- brings me joy, energizes me.  But at the end of the school day, I am exhausted.  I need sleep, sleep, and more sleep.  The introvert in me needs less sleep now because I am at home, interacting daily with my husband and four kids, and then zooming with my students and colleagues.  While I'm tired, I don't have that same exhaustion that I have when driving to work and teaching all day.

All this is to say that I'm an introvert, and quarantine suits me.  Last year I kept a blog while we lived in Italy.  118 entries over 11 months.  Since we returned to the states last July, I have been thinking about writing.  But life, and work, and people, and connecting got in the way.  I had nothing left for writing.  Now, nine weeks into quarantine, I just vacuumed out my car and last night created a new blog.  I am going to write again.

Is this the gift of quarantine?  Writing again?  Letting my introvert self revel in being alone some, even if I call my girlfriends all the time?

So yes, I like people. I need people.  And I need less energy to be by myself.  In fact, I get more energy to do things for myself, like writing, when I am not around people as much.  In an essay on writing (from This is the Story of a Happy Marriage), Ann Patchett writes about saying no to people in order to write.  No, I don't want to go out to dinner.  No, I don't want to play ultimate frisbee.  No, I don't want to join (and then leave) another book club.  I am going to hole myself up and write.  Ann Lamott, in Bird by Bird, says, Write lots of bad sentences, and Write shitty first drafts.

There I am.  Getting started again.