Self Isolation, Day 16
Dear Diary, I’m sorry that I have not been as regular writing to you as I intended. It’s just that life has been a little turned upside-down in the past couple of weeks. Discombobulated. Deconstructed. Disrupted.
The people living in the UK have been told to stay home due to a new and highly contagious virus. So here we are, staying at home. It’s been 16 days since I’ve left the house.
I’m aware that many people feel like they don’t know what to do with themselves. When I have a spare minute I encounter this feeling too, from time to time. The truth is, though, that there is rarely an opening in my day to pause, reflect, and make sense of how my time is spent. My life fully orbits around my son, as it always has, but without the support of occupational therapists, teachers, speech and language therapists and having him engaged with other people like he would in a ‘normal’ school day, all these hats are now ones that I wear throughout the day. On the one hand, it is pretty intense trying to keep up with him, but perhaps it is that very lack of time that I have to analyse everything that is the very thing that keeps me going. Who knows.
What seems to be working for me at the moment, is working with my hands. These hands of mine, that for over a decade have been dedicated to touching people and their stories, are craving human touch, the sense of curiosity embedded in purposeful work. Therefore, on those rare moments when do find myself having nothing to ‘do’ I have been doing the following:
building a giant wigwam with young, dead cypress trunks and clipped rhododendron branches (very good for weaving the siding as they are flexible and strong)
constructing a raised vegetable bed
putting together a bicycle that came flat packed
paper mâché-ing pretty much everything
kneading dough and baking bread
tuning my guitar and piano fingers
So you see, dear diary, these are my reasons in not yet writing you anything of substance just yet. I’m hoping in this second week that I can begin to take you a little more seriously and check in every day.
I also have a new, and slightly more coveted project that I will be starting to document, but unfortunately I can’t share anything with you on that front just yet. I promise, you’ll understand everything soon enough. Signing off, for now.
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