Confession time: I’ve always been a bit of a homebody. While some of my friends would go out and party or go to a sporting event, I’ve always just been more comfortable with a book or a movie. Ultimately, staying inside has never really been a problem for me, but this whole situation has really messed with me in another way. As anyone who knows me could probably tell you, I’ve always been bad at managing time. Whether it was spending a whole weekend playing video games or getting particularly engrossed in a good book and losing a day somewhere between those pages, I could, for better or worse, always depend on work or classes to ground myself during the week. There was a time for class, a time for work, and a time for the rest of the things that I’m sure should be done (but eventually just devolved into YouTube or video games). I’ve been dependent on this work/life balance for a while now and this whole situation has been kind of upsetting on that front.
Since campus closed, I’ve been finding myself working late into the night on assignments that I would normally break up into multiple days, getting sidetracked on tangents that eventually devolve into digging through the depths of Wikipedia in search of obscure information, and ignoring alarms that I used to revolve my life around. There’s a lot of anxiety going on right now in the world, a lot of fear, and I think that I’ve just kind of been keeping busy as a kind of defense mechanism.
But I’ve also found time for some of the things that had kind of fallen to the wayside. I’ve reconnected with some friends from high school over Facebook, picked up old hobbies that I’d set aside when I didn’t have time for them anymore, and I’ve finally gotten around to putting together some of the exercise equipment that has been sitting in the garage for a while.. now to see if I actually end up using it. But heck, it’s not like I don’t have the time. But what I’m saying is that just because we’re stuck at home, it doesn’t mean that we have to be bored, you know? As long as you’re doing something, anything really, and you’re staying away from other people, you’re fighting the good fight.
