Isolation is hard, but I already knew that
/The past month of national coronavirus lockdown has been hard on my family.
We have a kid with serious behavioral, psychiatric and learning disabilities and another kid with dyslexia. We are coping with the excessive demands of insensitive and disengaged teachers. We’ve been learning to cook from scratch faster than ever before. There have been a few weeks in there where supplies were hard to come by and we had to get creative with our prepper techniques.
But I hear a very different kind of suffering echoing across the internet. Other people are suffering from social isolation, a loss of control in their lives and a complete disruption of their routines. Anxiety levels are skyrocketing and clinical emotional problems are exacerbated.
For awhile I was a bit mystified, at times even dismissive. How can all these people be so wimpy? Most of them don’t have kids with complex challenges and no one is emailing them with threats of failing grades for an assignment that was thirty minutes late due to internet problems. They’re just stuck at home, alone, resting!
I always did have sympathy for the people stuck with kids in small city apartments, but oddly those aren’t the complaints you hear most about. By and large, the loudest wails of distress are coming from the privileged suburbs. Those who I expected to be most vulnerable seem to be stoically silent.
At first, I wondered if this was because they didn’t have access to the internet. I contacted a friend who is a single mother in the inner city and asked in depth about their well-being. She assured me that they were coping well. She can still go to work and her ten-year-old has been semi-parenting and supervising homework for the eight-year-old and the seven-year-old for years already. Homeschooling them and herself isn’t that much more. They’re used to hard times.
I shook my head in wonder and went back to my own struggle, feeling decidedly inferior to the ten-year-old in the inner city.
But as the weeks have passed and I have observed the struggles of others (and read a certain amount of psychological analysis), I realized something significant.
That social distancing that is causing so much havoc for so many people… I know it well. I’ve lived it for years as a socially excluded person with a disability. The amount that I leave my house has only decreased slightly, despite the fact that we’re on national COVID-19 lockdown with only essential supply runs allowed.
Photo by Arie Farnam
My social contact has only been reduced a little, since there was very little of it to begin with. The only change in my daily routine is that my kids are home and I can’t do my work because they are so overwhelmingly needy and their teachers are insanely demanding.
That loss of control in people’s lives… I have always lived in a world where I had very little power in the outside world and I was forced to make harsh choices to build a life I love in the small area I can influence.
For years the decisions of others to exclude or include, to harm or to take have hit me like successive waves that I was powerless to deflect. My only power was always in how I took the waves and what I did with driftwood that washed up.
And that disruption of routine and the resulting rudderless confusion… I remember when I was in my twenties and I first left the shelter of structured education. It was terrifying for a few years. I spent almost every day alone. My work was independent and no one was giving me daily feedback. I had to create my own structure, my own schedule and routine. If I got any reward or consequence for my work or lack there of, it was in terms of months, rather than minute by minute or day to day.
And it was hard. I recall the months I spent struggling against depression, sitting among the boxes in a little room I rented at the time in a city where I had few friends and no family.
I knew that my life was in my own hands, that I had to get up and do the work despite the isolation, that no one else would do it for me and no one would help me. It was paralyzing and demotivating and such a heavy load.
As I start to realize these things, my empathy grows in bounds for the people experiencing this for the first time. Suddenly, the people who were out in the free world, who had a social life and regular jobs and culture and community have been thrown into a life that is much more like mine.
I remember the six years I spent almost entirely alone—often on two-week bouts of lockdown and enforced rest—while I struggled with intractable and medically unexplained infertility. I remember the many resolutions I made to study something, to use my open-ended time wisely, to be calm and to practice good grooming habits. Day after day, month after month, I started new schedules and forced myself into healthier routines.
Then as an inexperienced, new mother of traumatized children adopted from Eastern European orphanages, with no women friends to advise me, I spent the baby days battling the demons of despair, guilt, shame, depression and extreme loneliness. Without the ability to drive, it was nearly impossible to get to mommy-and-me classes for toddlers and when I made the mile-long trek into town, other mothers told me that my inability to make eye contact due to my disability made me unacceptable for their group.
So, I made my own music circle with my two kids. I put up colorful posters on the walls. I had an art project scheduled for every day. I tried to teach my preschoolers to cook. I started early reading programs with them and learned to garden.
But it took years! I’m not bragging. I’m aching for all the people facing isolation just now for the first time. If it feels really really hard. That’s because it is.
I’ve been there. And I didn’t overcome it in a few days or a few weeks. I did overcome it, but it took years.
In the end, I did learn a lot of great skills. I can now make my own schedule and I get up happily before dawn, meditate and go out to tend to my garden and animals all before the kids get up. But I didn’t start out that way. I was a wreck, a mess, like a lot of people report being a mess now.
It might help to listen to those people you know who have traditionally been somewhat isolated. Ask them how they stay sane and healthy. If you’re struggling with this, consider that while whole societies being at home in lockdown is unprecedented, you aren’t really the first people to experience it. And those of us who have known isolation and didn’t succumb to extreme depression, addiction or unhealthy living have skills that you can learn.
I have read several self-care articles out there on the web that try to teach these skills and I remember when such things sounded very unrealistic to me. They tell you to keep to a routine, to try to set a time to get up, to shower and get dressed as you used to when you had someplace to go. They tell you to eat regular meals and make sure they’re healthy. They tell you to limit your time staring at social media and scary news reports on TV. They tell you not to beat yourself up mentally when inevitably you fail at all of this.
So from experience,, are they right?
Yup, they’re right. Routine helps. A lot.
Regular bedtimes and waking times help. Personal hygiene isn’t just for the physical health concerns. It really helps the whole situation. It helps you feel purposeful and gives back some of that sense of control. Healthy eating and healthy sleeping both have major psychological effects. And I can’t tell you how many times I’ve paid the unpleasant price for wasting half a day on social media.
But the thing I rarely find in these lists, the skill that I think I developed over time that has helped the most, is actually making a schedule for yourself with a purpose greater than daily survival in mind.
About ten years ago, I realized that my life was probably never going to change, that I was never going to be accepted and welcomed into the community and a wonderful group of friends. And somehow, against all the weight of years of depression and media programming that said friends are the sum total of a person’s worth, I decided to build a happy life anyway.
I started building it step by step, by deciding what I wanted in my life and scheduling it. I scheduled a daily spiritual practice and did it.
For the first few years, I didn’t manage to do it every day. Then there came a year that I did manage it every day, except once when I was really sick. For the next two years, it felt like an accomplishment. Then it became indispensable and something I would never voluntarily miss.
I’m close to that level on daily exercise, but not quite to the point where it is automatic. I have managed to get daily contact with nature, animals and gardening into my life. I’ve managed to make daily writing part of my life.
I now manage to keep a schedule for my kids schooling despite their vehement protests and natural disinclination. I manage to have regular and healthy meal times for the whole family. But it all started with scheduling a few things I wanted in my life, like spiritual practice and exercise.
If you’ve read this far, you are intrepid and I know you can do this. Focus on the essentials and on your core values.
Here is a method for developing a fulfilling life even when you’re in isolation:
Figure out a practical routine of waking, grooming, eating and sleeping that actually works for you in your given situation.
Set alarms and push yourself to stick to it.
When it falls apart, look at the routine and the clock and get back into it at that point. Don’t spend time and energy berating yourself for being lazy or lacking self-discipline. Like they say with meditation, just gently return to your focus.
Once those basics have been mastered, you will have somewhat more energy and less chaos around you. Use some of that mental space to think about your core values and what you really want in your life. If you have to work at the same time, consider your work to be one of the priorities.
Write down your daily routine with times when it works for you to fulfill it. How strict you are with those times depends on your personality and whether or not being relaxed about the times results in the routine being fulfilled or results in chaos. Learn from disasters and adjust the routine as necessary. There’s always another day to practice on.
Then choose one thing you really must reintegrate into your life. That could be the thing that provides income or it could be physical exercise. Both are essential. But choose just one for now, and write it into your time schedule. Try it for a few days.
Then choose the next most important thing and write that into the schedule.
As you add more priorities to your life, you’ll run into problems. Some things take longer than you think. You may start to experience real fatigue again and need to adjust your sleeping hours. Tackle each issue as it comes. There is nothing you can’t fix or at least improve.
When you have integrated the priorities you don’t want to live without, stop adding things to your schedule, at least for a while. Get the schedule down really well before adding optional extras. Then when you add something else, pay attention to the effect on your whole daily routine.
This is the basic method. Of course, it sounds easier than it is. If it was easy, everyone in quarantine would be fine. But I know from experience that it can be done. It can be done alone and it can be done with a spouse and kids. Each variation has its own challenges. The key is focusing on building a life that you enjoy, bit by bit.
A word about self-discipline: Yes, self-discipline helps. But society tends to view it as something you have or something you don’t have. Many people will fail at this routine again and again and think that means they lack self-discipline. The thing is that the discipline is the starting over every day. That’s the crux. Yes, there are people for whom sticking to the routine is easier and some for whom it is harder. Some of that is about tenacity but a lot of it is about whatever circumstances you find yourself in. The discipline part is failing and getting back at it again… and again… and again… and again.
A note about depression: Your propensity to sink into depression in isolation or due to failing at your routine is largely biochemical. You can’t entirely control whether you do or not. Healthy food, meditation, positive thinking techniques, contact with friends and (pleasant) family over the phone, exercise and sleep will all help ward off depression. Comparing yourself to other people with different biochemistry generally will not help.
A note about purpose: One of the greatest and least discussed antidotes to depression is purpose. You can’t feel purposeful very well unless you have mastered the basic routine, but once you have, it may help a great deal to choose something you want to accomplish during this quarantine time. It can be as simple as building some abs through a lot of exercise on your yoga mat in a small apartment, or it can be as grand as preparing applications for graduate school or writing that book you’ve always wanted to write.
If you are, like me, stuck in a situation where purpose is elusive because each day is still a massive struggle to get through even the basics, whether that is due to harsh physical conditions, crowded conditions or disabilities, you likely already know there aren’t a lot of simple answers. But keeping to a little bit of greater purpose still helps me.
Hang in there. Keep getting up, even when it feels hopeless and useless. The use is always in the fact that your life will be more enjoyable if you create your own routine and schedule, even if just vegging out may feel enjoyable in the short-term. You’ve probably done that enough by now to know it doesn’t actually pan out that way.
Stay in touch with those you love far away, stay awake inside yourself and build what you want your life to be like within the external conditions. These are the things I learned through isolation.
