Y’all. This pandemic is hard. It’s hard on everyone.

I’m like the rest of you, walking around in a fog of Zoom login info and virtual learning schedules and trying to remember what seemed so great about baking bread once upon a time. I stare out the same windows onto the same view hour after hour and wonder why I can’t stop doomscrolling long enough to phonebank for the Biden campaign.

OK, that one has an easy answer. I hate everything about talking on the phone and making even one call requires a day of pep talks. Phone banking is not in my nature. I’ll just send Joe some more money or something.

The thing is I WANT to be the person I was before life shut down. I like being a human who can do something other than read escapist fiction and sometimes do a load of laundry. I want to have Big Thoughts about Big Issues. I hoped that the stress if the shutdown would relent and I could get my cognitive faculties back by now. However, since public health efforts are failing, I need to seek mental health help for myself.

I have ADHD, which is not really a revelation. I’m open about it. I also have depression. I had to quit ADHD meds to take depression meds a few years ago. Luckily, ADHD and depression can all be happening in the same part of the brain so the depression meds helped with focus and I was all good.

Until the pandemic. Then my ability to focus left along with any hope of seeing live theatre or sending the kids back to school. Gone. Buh-bye!

It only took me five months of wandering through the mental cobwebs to make the phone call (see above about phone calls) to get an appointment to talk drug cocktails with a mental health pro. I’m hopeful that she and I can coax my brain back into a higher state of functioning and I can do the high-level things I like again, like writing and activism.

Hell, I might even bake some bread.

So I’m back. Or almost back. Or at least I have a map that will lead me to back someday. And that is good enough for this week.

Photo by Miguel Á. Padriñán from Pexels