9 Little Things I’ve Learned During This Pandemic

This month, I’m focussing on being mindful of who receives my discretionary spending. I’m fortunate to have some money to put toward recreation, so I’m going to focus on paying Black creators. I’m buying Black authors’ ebooks after enjoying them from the library and joining the Patreons of the Black podcasters whose work I’ve started to listen to. If I care about diverse art that includes Black art (especially in spheres where I’m a creator too, like science fiction and fantasy writing), then where I spend my money needs to back up what I believe.

1. Just because it’s a pandemic doesn’t mean my social energy has increased.

Remember back in the early weeks when I very seriously explained that I was going to try to reach out to a “new” person each day?

Yeah, it turns out that was over-optimistic. When I wrote it, I was putting together a bunch of important truths: I love my friends and family! There are so many people I don’t get to see or talk to on a regular basis! I wish I had more non-social-media contact with them! The pandemic is overwhelming and lonely!

I forgot another important truth, though: I have approximately 5 minutes of social time in me per day, if that. Hanging out with other people, whether online or in person, takes a lot out of me, and if I’ve done it recently, I like a good long stretch of doing stuff by myself. Even–or maybe especially–during a pandemic, when social contact is limited and I spend much less time interacting with strangers or surrounded by people, that doesn’t mean I can magically transfer the exhaustion I’m “saving” into a never-ending supply of emotional energy.

Instead, I’ve got to accept that it’s OK to not want to do a particular social thing even if everyone is socially starved right now. I’m allowed to experience this crisis the way it feels to me and do what I need to do.

2. Bodyweight exercises (calisthenics) are my jam.

Don’t get me wrong, the instant I can safely book a private hour in the weight room with minimal risk to myself and others, I’m there for heavy deadlifts and barbell squats. And resistance bands are helpful to assist when I’m not quite strong enough to lift my full body weight or when I want to isolate a particular muscle.

But I’ve found that calisthenic movements, like push-ups, pull-ups, single-leg Romanian deadlifts and pistol squats, are much easier to make constructively challenging. I feel like a flexible, independent badass when I get them right. Knowing I can move my body through space with controlled strength is awesome. So is working my balance and supporting muscles even when I’m focussing on a single key area.

Not to mention, calisthenics feel like more bang for my buck: instead of doing four different exercises to work different heads of my biceps, I can do chin-ups and pike push-ups for functional strength in half the time.

3. Have-done lists are better for me right now than to-do lists.

Sometimes, I end up letting my to-do list drive me instead of vice versa. In early July, I got so overwhelmed that I took a week off. Seeing the pages of my weekly planner full of empty space instead of jammed with my reminders to myself felt great.

So the next week, I decided to keep it that way. I phased some of my regular work back in, but I stopped writing down daily aspirations, like practicing the languages I’m learning, writing, or working out. Instead, I only wrote down items if they made me anxious I was going to forget them, like taking out oversize garbage on a particular day or confirming the grocery order before the cut-off.

And, on a whim, I started filling my planner again. Only, this time, instead of writing down what I meant to do before the day began, I saved half of the space allotted for each day to write down what I’d accomplished.

It turns out this practice really works for me. Seeing an undone to-do item at the end of the day stresses me out, but if I don’t finish something in time to add it to my have-done list, the empty space doesn’t eat at me the same way. And writing down all the stuff I did helps me realize that, hey, actually, even though I had to rest a bunch, I wasn’t lazy. I still accomplished a lot.

I know I’ll need to be careful not to let myself get fixated on my new process instead of feeling good about myself and my work, but for now, it’s working.

4. I’m okay driving in Toronto.

Our old car was… not great. Its air conditioning bit the dust at the start of last summer, it was constantly getting recalled, and it had transmission problems more than once. After talking it over, Husband and I agreed that we could afford a new car, and, luckily for us, a local dealership had a great vehicle on offer.

There was just one problem. The dealership was all the way at the other end of the city, and between signing the papers and our appointment to pick up the car, Husband had pulled a muscle in his neck. He couldn’t turn his head well enough to drive safely. So (gulp!) I was gonna have to drive home.

Let’s sum up my feelings on the subject with: I really, really didn’t want to. But we needed a working car, especially in the middle of a pandemic.

Long story short, I plotted out a highway-free route and did it. And I still don’t like driving, and I still have a long way to go before I feel comfortable, say, in Toronto rush-hour traffic or on a highway within the GTA. But I’m okay to go get the groceries ten minutes away or to run errands on the major streets near our condo. The new car helps, but knowing I could make the cross-city drive when I had to helps even more.

5. My spouse is an excellent day-to-day cook, not just on special occasions.

Pre-pandemic, I cooked every night (with some freebies when social or work events fed us elsewhere), and we ate out once a week. For the first few months of the pandemic, I did the same. It felt much more stressful, on account of not having a particular ingredient or staple feeling much more dire and being much harder to rectify, but overall, it worked fine.

Then I started getting tired of struggling to finish work stuff each day so I could get dinner going. I asked Husband to handle dinner once a week. First, I asked him to make a couple comfort-food recipes he’d already made dozens times. Then, after a couple weeks, I asked him to make something he’d never made himself but liked to eat: chicken wings. Even though he’s made dozens of complicated holiday meals, I linked him to the butcher’s recommendations, because I didn’t want him to have to do extra work.

Instead, he found a recipe he preferred. Not only was it delicious, but the experience led him to realize that cooking during the pandemic was kind of soothing for him.

So now, I plan the meals, arrange the groceries, take care of prep like marinating/defrosting, and send him recipe suggestions for dishes he might not recognize. I cook dinner once a week on his busiest day, we order in once a week, and he cooks the rest of the time. And everything he makes is great! He’s a more patient and methodical cook than me, and he adds his own touch to a lot of our favourite dishes.

6. I can do only two major things per day.

No problem, I said to myself at the start of social isolation. I can do sooooo much in a day. Without subway commute time, that’s, like, fifteen or sixteen hours from the moment I wake up until bed time. Even taking out a few hours here and there for eating and whatnot, that’s still tons of time! I mean, if I work for three hours on my writing and three hours on university stuff, that’s enough to get everything done. Then two hours for my work out, and the rest of the time for all the little jobs like language-learning practice and blogging–easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy!

Ha ha ha. It turns out that real-life me doesn’t follow the same schedule as ideal-me. For weeks, I was berating myself for being difficult-pifficult-lemon-lazy. Why couldn’t I get these things done? How did I manage to do so little in so much time?

Finally, I realized that it wasn’t about me not working hard enough to live up to my expectations. It was about me setting ridiculous expectations that didn’t match my lifestyle, personality, or energy levels.

Now I try to divide the day into two. There are three major things that eat up my time: working out, writing, and working on school stuff. I can do two of these three things per day, plus little tasks as they come up. Sometimes not the little tasks. That’s it. If I have a meeting or mid-day commitment, well, that’s one of my two slots gone. If I still have energy after both tasks, great! On to a third! If I don’t, so be it.

7. Internet junk food is not right for me.

Part of the reason I was having so much trouble managing my time is what I’d do to relax. Read a book? Paint or draw? Watch a video? Chat with a friend? Play a game? Nah. Why do any of those things when instead, I could chase fleeting hits of dopamine on my phone???

It feels great to tap on that clickbait headline. But the same old dozen memes/Twitter screencaps that have been floating around online since forever lead to rapidly diminishing returns. And then I’m tapping on another silly link to chase that “oooh, I bet this will be interesting” rush.

By the end of the day, I’ve seen nothing new or exciting; I don’t remember much of what I did see; my bad arm hurts from using my phone so much; and I never actually felt interested.

So at the start of July, I set some drastic boundaries for myself: no content-churning sites, whether they’re traditional humour or listicles. I expanded them as the month continued: no checking the news more than once a day. Delete any source that doesn’t make me excited from my feed reader. Read all my saved feed articles by the end of the day or delete them from my Pocket account (unless, like, there was a crisis and I just didn’t have time to read anything). Don’t check my feed reader more than once a day.

Since I started this, I’ve felt… usually much better. Sometimes just regular better, sometimes just not worse, but, hey, that’s life. I don’t miss the feeds I culled. And I’ve started to make headway on other stuff I’ve shoved off for “someday,” like watching YouTube explainers on cool topics.

8. Tor e-books are DRM-free.

This means that I can open them after they’re due “back” at the library. Which makes figuring out how to read and return all my e-books in a timely fashion much easier. Of course I buy them if I want to keep them, and I return them as soon as I’m done. But having an extra day or two really helps in this unpredictable pandemic world.

9. Face masks are great for cleaning.

I used to hate cleaning the bathroom because the heavily scented or chemical-smelling sprays would permeate the air and make it tough for me to breathe for hours afterward. But it turns out that wearing a cloth mask, like the ones we own because, you know, PANDEMIC, helps a lot.

I mean, I still hate cleaning the bathroom, but now it’s for entirely different reasons.