Keeping Sane in an Insane World
As writers, we live in our heads and spend a lot of time on sitting on our butts, which is why exercise is so critical to our mental health.
When I’m deeply focused on writing I tend to ignore my body’s signals, desperate to capture the words on the page before they slip away. Suddenly, I’ll realize that I’m starving and it’s hours past lunch, or I’m busting for a pee, or that my tailbone hurts from sitting for so long.
Years of being on back-to-back deadlines have only exacerbated this. That’s why I make sure to incorporate some form of exercise as often as I can.
For the past two years, I’ve been learning Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, after having caught the bug during a Women’s Self Defense class put on by Greenwich Police Department. It’s great for self-defense, conditioning, and confidence, but it requires you to get really up close and personal with your sparring partner — pretty much the antithesis of social distancing. The Wednesday before the gyms closed, I emailed Jeff Morris, our coach at Greenwich Jiu-Jitsu, explaining that given my age and the fact that I had asthma, I was going to have to bow out for now. I miss rolling, and my BJJ crew. A lot. I miss them so much that just writing this made me set up a virtual happy hour for tomorrow, so we can check in with each other.
I’m so grateful to Kenna Olson, owner of Precisely Pilates, for moving to “Zoomilates” mere days after Governor Lamont made the wise decision to close all gyms. Now that I’m not commuting to Danbury four times a week to teach, I’m checking in with my Pilates crew pretty much every day. Keeping to an exercise routine isn’t just good for my physical health, it’s hopefully going to help mitigate any stress eating so I don’t gain the Quarantine15.
For most of my Type-A overachiever stressed-out adult life, people have been telling me I should do yoga. I’d joke that it is exactly that personality that makes me more stressed when I’m doing yoga, because I’m holding the poses thinking “When do we get to move?”
Yes, I know — that’s precisely the reason I should do yoga, right?
Funnily enough, that’s been one of benefits of this quarantine. About a week ago on Twitter, one of the people I follow retweeted author Sudha Balagopol, who also happens to be a certified yoga instructor, offering to lead a class on Facebook Live.
I’m not sure if it’s that I’m so desperate to relieve the stress or that I’m finally willing to accept the deeply focus on my body that yoga requires (as a recovered bulimic, I’ve always tried to avoid things that make me think too much about that) but finally, the stillness makes sense. Yes, my thoughts still wander to what I have to do next — that Type A overachiever thing is baked into my DNA —
but I’m learning to observe that rather than having it cause me more stress.
I even managed to keep contact with my Jiu-Jitsu practice by using my belt as to stretch.
None of us know how long we’ll be sheltering in place, but given the most recent graphs of the U.S. trajectory, which currently looks even worse than Italy did at a similar point, I suspect we’re not going to be going out freely and easily in society for a long time.
Something that’s both made me crazy and helped me stay sane is my work as a professor of writing at WCSU. Figuring out the best way to transition four classes to online learning with not a lot of notice or training has been challenging and time consuming. My students are confused and scared. I am, too, but I want to give them the best experience I can under these circumstances. I’m still trying to figure out the best way for my business and tech writing students to present their final projects. I’m trying to absorb the tsunami of information that’s being put out about distance learning, which is often conflicting. I’ve been checking in with my students about what they need — some prefer an asynchronous setup where they can do the work in their own time, and others crave the connection. My first Webex meeting with my Craft of Writing IV: Form and Inspiration class was a hilarious disaster, which included me tripping over all the wires by my desk and almost face-planting when I went to let in my dog, who’d been whining incessantly and pathetically outside my office door.
My Type A kicked in as soon as I logged off. I started beating myself up, feeling like I’d failed my students at the worst possible time.
But then I got an email: “Thank you for the lighthearted and fun class today, even with all the small mishaps it’s refreshing to still feel connected to school and hear from classmates and professors in this time.”
Take that, Type A me! Maybe failure is just what we all needed to remind us this is going to be different. We’re going to have to adapt. But most of all, as I reminded my students at the end of class, we have to keep our sense of humor.
This post is part of a larger project, #MOC19. Read more about the Mass Observation Covid 19 project here.
