This Is Us

As I write this, my city is on lockdown in response to the spread of Covid-19 — which means it’s just me and my body, alone together, in my little row house in Pittsburgh. I can’t go to the gym, obviously. I’m cooking for myself, and eating alone. I’m not dressing for anyone or anything. The only person I need to please is me.

Our current situation is with what diet culture tells me should be my ultimate Fat Girl Fear. In a world without shame, without the rails of other people’s judgment to keep me in check, I’ve been…

Even though I love to, I normally only bake on special occasions. After all, it’s time consuming, and I don’t need three dozen cookies or an entire cake to eat by myself.

That’s all changed, with this pandemic. Now I’m baking up a storm and super grateful my neighbors aren’t so germ-phobic they won’t take some so I can’t eat it all by myself.

Everything that usually keeps me from baking is why baking is saving my sanity right now. Baking can be fairly straightforward, but the yummiest things are often labor and time-intensive. You use a ton of bowls…

I’m a bonafide optimist. In fact, I’ll admit my sunny disposition can be a little much even in the best of times. But throughout this pandemic, I’ve been struggling to find the bright side of anything, and it’s disorienting. All my previous tactics for feeling better don’t seem to be working.

What I’m learning is that the best way to deal with hard emotions isn’t to arm myself with more optimism. It doesn’t work to simply put on a smile and chirp, “We’ll get through this!” Instead, I need to see this challenge in a different way.

A recent episode…

I had a rough couple of days last week and I’m sure I’m not the only one. These are crazy times, and while I’ve got decent coping mechanisms, there’s a LOT to cope with. So after a few days of kinda spiraling, I had to give myself a bit of a talking to. What was I doing that wasn’t helping, as I confronted all this craziness we’re living in? The answers, it turns out, were pretty obvious. Here are some of the things I was NOT doing, which were exacerbating — rather than alleviating — my anxieties.

Letting my evening routine slip

It seemed silly…

These are scary times, but they’re not exactly exciting ones. Unless counting toilet paper rolls is your idea of a raging Friday night, you’re probably not living your most thrilling life right now. So why in the world would you want to record it?

It’s a fair question. But weirdly, I can’t think of a better — or more necessary — time to start journaling.

First, there’s the big-picture rationale: We’re in an unprecedented time in American history. If, like me, you’re fascinated by stories of how people lived during World War II or after earthquakes or through the Depression…

I’ve always had a weird relationship to resting. Growing up, my mother got up in the morning and, like a worker bee, she was never still again until it’s time for bed. My father, however, can almost always be found in one place: sitting at their counter, reading a paper or listening to NPR, drinking coffee or sherry, and smoking his pipe.

In other word, he rests a lot while my she rests…never. Meanwhile, my mother is quite vocal about what she thinks about my dad’s habits, to which my father merely shrugs and puffs smoke, like a professorial dragon…

When we go into a bookstore for a pop fiction novel, we often know which section we’re going to head to first. We might head to Sci Fi/Fantasy, or Mystery, or the Romance section. Sometimes we’re confounded when a popular fiction writer like Stephen King or Dean Koontz are allowed on the (often centralized) shelves labeled simply FICTION. But for the most part, because people know what they want to read, bookstores are laid out to help us find it.

This is why, if you want to publish a popular fiction novel, you have to know where your book would…

If you’re like me, you’re finding it hard to concentrate at the moment. I pick up my phone to check a date to answer an email, and I find myself scrolling through Instagram five minutes later, having forgotten what I was meant to be doing in the first place.

I’m even finding it hard to concentrate on my entertainments! I can’t always focus to read, and if I try to watch anything that requires thinking, I end up drifting over to my computer to check the New York Times.

The only thing I can really get into seems to be…