Don't be too hard on yourself now, survive

For three weeks now I have been sitting at home and I feel like I'm at 100 kilos and looking like a caveman.

My locks have two and a half months of growth and my beard is wilding out, doing its own thing while gaining its personality.

I feel like I'll need to do a post-quarantine photoshoot for one advertising something in the jungle. Advertisers? Anyone? I'm ready!

This has been a long, long week. If we were able to measure the mental length of weeks, this is almost equal to the week that people thought the world was going to end in 1999.

Y2K. Remember that? Well, to be honest, I was too young to remember much of it but that's exactly why documentaries exist, but it looks like it was cra-a-aazy!

So I have been trying to find the balance between keeping informed and trying to keep away from agitating myself.

It's not been an easy journey because every three and a half seconds someone is shouting about corona seated on a donkey, yanking through the neighbourhood, at least that's how my mind sees it. I could be wrong but you can never really know, can you?

COLLECTIVE GRIEF

I've also been pretty low on creativity and energy as has been many people than I know, both online and in real life.

It initially did not make sense to me as we're home all day. We shouldn't be tired from flipping channels, should we?

I read something this week though that changed my mind on what I am feeling.

I've been feeling anxious and tired but I can't pinpoint exactly why. The feeling I have is that of grief, in different forms, the article explained.

Quoting Scott Berinato: "Yes, and we're feeling several different griefs. We feel the world has changed, and it has. We know this is temporary, but it doesn't feel that way, and we realise things will be different. Just as going to the airport is forever different from how it was before 9/11, things will change and this is the point at which they changed.

The loss of normalcy; the fear of economic toll; the loss of connection. This is hitting us and we're grieving. Collectively. We are not used to this kind of collective grief in the air."

So there you have it; you're not ‘broken’. And the good news is that we have a word for what we're collectively feeling, GRIEF.

HELPLESS

I asked myself, so what's brought us to this feeling? It's the fact that we're used to a minimum level of certainty in our lives about the basics and now it's all been taken away from all of us at the same time.

What makes it even worse right now is that it's infinite and there's no end in sight.

A really good friend of mine, Steph, had just started her new job and was looking forward to her first pay cheque, but right before the month ended she was put on partial pay indefinitely, and she didn't know what to do.

I didn't know what to tell her because what exactly could I say? What could I say to my other friend Waguthi, who has an expectant wife and his father, both dependent on him and he's suddenly home without pay?

I felt helpless this last week and so do many people around me and probably you reading this article right now.

I took a walk to town. A walk because I have been in the house for two weeks and needed time to think while practicing social distancing.

PERSPECTIVE

This is a time that married men are being sent to go buy gas and are going to Mombasa Road even though they live on Thika Road.

Everyone needs an escape so we won't take a swipe at them today. Well, they should have married people who are also their friends because we can't all make good decisions like staying single.

My walk to town cleared my mind and gave me perspective, and I hope everyone gets some in their different way over the next few weeks.

You don't have to be productive at this very moment if you're stuck at home. There's pressure for people to do all sorts of things with their time but chances are that you're not in the mental space to do them no matter how much time you have, and that won't change because your friends and people from the internet gave you 1,001 ideas.

Take time to just be. Watch that movie, read that book, play that guitar, play with your kids and whatever else you can do each day and celebrate that.

Right now all you need to do is survive and that's a win in itself. Thrive!