It's Quiet In Here

Of course, I miss all the obvious things the pandemic has taken away. I haven't seen my grandparents or siblings in over a year. I miss meeting up with friends for dinner at a new restaurant in a new neighborhood, one I had to take the train to reach. I miss weddings and baby showers and going to book club.

But the thing I couldn’t predict about all of this isolation was how different it feels inside my head. 

For the first time in decades, it feels like it’s just me in here. 

This kind of quiet that now fills my mind isn’t a relief. It’s more of a hollow echo. 

Before the pandemic, I was around people all the time. Their ideas, their experiences, their stories flickered in and out of my day, shaping the things I thought about and the perspectives I formed. 

In a meeting, someone would present context that would completely shift my plan for a project. (That changes everything.) 

At lunch, a colleague would talk about a tussle they got into in a street market in Yemen. (I can’t imagine being in that situation!)

After work, over drinks with friends, one would confess their frustration with a mutual acquaintance. (I thought it was only me…)

All day, the tapestries of other people’s lives would display before me. The movies they had seen. The things their grandmothers had told them growing up. Their worries and obsessions and jokes, so different from my own. All of this was making me bigger, more engaged. Making me scribble something down in my Notes app to look up later. 

I miss the conversations with people that made me realize they see the world in an entirely different way than I do. And not in a “wow, they voted for HIM??” kind of way, which seems to be the only “alternative perspective” we’re spending time with these days. 

I miss being in the same place as another person while we react differently to the same thing. I miss hearing about what people did over the weekend (and the answer being more than “well, we just finished The Crown”). I miss casual exposure to all of the individual choice--walking down a sidewalk and seeing a woman in a mustard yellow skirt and red lipstick, a man with a unicycle, a pack of teenagers goofing off. (Where did she get that skirt? What’s he going for here? DOES YOUR MOTHER KNOW WHERE YOU ARE?)

It’s akin to the feeling I get in art museums--reading the placards and considering the lives and preoccupations of artists. Spending time with wall-sized versions of deliberate visions I, myself, could never have. Come to think of it, I also really miss art museums. 

And now? My head feels small and quiet. Surprise and stimulation are replaced by routine, the prescription we’ve all bought into to survive this pandemic. 

Structure your day so that time has meaning. Plan moments of self-care to keep you going. 

I make French press coffee at 5AM while I start work. At 9, I take the baby on a walk, where the only new stimuli are the neighbors’ slightly shifting holiday decorations. (And even that blends together in my neighborhood, where it’s not unusual to see a skeleton with a Santa hat or a spider web hung with baubles.) Lunch. Tea at two. More work. Various baby naps and bottles. The endless catalogue of chores. 

You know things have gotten mundane when you get excited for trash day, because your closet will be temporarily empty of Amazon boxes.

In a discussion with a friend about pandemic-induced grey hairs (which, because of pandemic-induced salon avoidance, we are living with), I said I'd given up any attachment to the idea of being pretty. 

"Best to be interesting and kind," she said, "which you have in spades."

The only problem is--without the voices of others in my head, I'm not sure I'm interesting anymore?

I've also been going down some pretty weird intellectual black holes, like wondering if a collective experience is making us ALL less interesting. Sure--now we have this thing we're all thinking and talking about all the time...but it's practically the only thing we're thinking and talking about all the time.

There’s the “how are you holding up?” conversation. 

There’s the “did you see the latest vaccine update?” conversation.

And if you’re really optimistic, there’s the “what are you going to do when all of this is over?” conversation.

I suppose the potential for human connection through a collective experience might outweigh the value of stimulating, bizarre thought, but it's a little hard to celebrate human connection when we're all remaining socially distant.

Maybe because of this distance, or maybe because of collective trauma, the little brushes we get with other people’s lives and perspectives don’t feel the same. Other people’s voices, these days, trigger our own judgment and assumptions, because we immediately fixate on the differences from our own pandemic decision-making. 

She posted a photo from a wedding on Instagram, and no one was wearing masks. 

So I went home for Thanksgiving. It’s fine. Nothing happened. 

Their kid is back in daycare--guess I can’t hang out with them anymore. 

Sure must be nice to be able to stay home. If I don’t go into work, I can’t pay my rent. 

She won’t even meet up with me in a park wearing masks--how is that risky?

He wants to have brunch. At a restaurant. Indoors. NOPE.

And the truth is, none of this racking and stacking of risk calculation--the petty arguments about whether or not we need to wear a mask when we’re exercising outdoors--is the least bit interesting. It’s individual, but it’s defensive. It’s rarely teaching us anything new. Instead of sending sparks through our brains, it bathes us in fear. 

I know people usually read this blog for little snippets of therapy. For techniques to try, insights to consider. And there are some things I’ve found that help a little--namely reading novels and memoirs. But mostly, I’m at a loss. It’s quiet, and I miss the racket. 

It’s not lost on me that, in writing this, I’m looking for someone to say, “you too??” Someone else to say that their view of our current lives is the same as mine--that their heads, too, are empty and uninteresting. 

This is the least interesting thing of all. Proof of more dull, gray, pandemic-duplicated brains. 

But maybe we don’t need interesting all the time. Maybe the consolation that comes with solidarity is more important for this moment in our personal and collective histories. I am trying to  approach my empty, quiet mind as if it is going through a fallow period and not silenced for good. And I’m engaging in a little bit of “what are you going to do when all of this is over?” 

I think I’ll break the rules, leave my headphones at home, and strike up a conversation with a stranger on public transportation. I’m going to listen until I can’t hear myself think.