When the World Gets Big, Go Small
How I’m finding control during a global pandemic
During our first virtual session, my therapist said something to me that changed my entire outlook on quarantine life. We’ve been meeting for about six months now, forced to go online in March, because, y’ know, there’s a pandemic on. Most of the time, I ramble through the entirety of our appointments, barely letting him give advice as it is his job to do. In all fairness, with starting college last fall and being routinely reminded about the lack of authority I possess over my own life, there’s been a lot to talk about.
My grandmother died a month into the first semester, followed by other family health crises.
Making friends at school proved to be a lot harder than I thought, and my version of a fun Saturday night usually meant eating ramen and watching Star Wars: The Clone Wars.
I still don’t fully understand how I made Dean’s List after all of the “hi please forgive my late work/absence/this poorly-timed email but my brain is broken” messages I sent to my professors out of desperation, but I’m not gonna complain.
I returned to campus for my second semester and was back home within 48 hours because of a stomach bug (thank goodness for staying in-state), and ended up being some form of sick for the majority of January, February, and March.
By the time spring break rolled around, I was struggling to get the motivation to complete the simplest of homework assignments even with a reduced course load.
At 2 am on the night before I was to go back to campus after the break, I broke down while trying to repack.
My life felt out of my control, and I wasn’t okay. As I sat sobbing on the couch, it was clear that something needed to change.
Filing for a leave of absence was far more complicated than it needed to be, but I got everything squared away, planning on getting a retail job and learning to drive with my new spare time.
Two days later, my college announced it was going online ’cause, again, there’s a pandemic on, and all those plans went out the window.
On the bright side, I moved out of my dorm with the rest of the student body, so I didn’t have to answer any awkward questions.
So, there I was living at home again, not just shocked back into my own new reality, but, like the rest of the world, forced deal with the death of normalcy.
As I sat video-chatting my therapist, wearing pajamas and clearly exasperated from feeling like the universe was tossing me around like a rag-doll, he told me: “When the world gets really big, go small”: take control of what you can.
I decided to take his advice.
Naturally, I then got a two-month-long sinus infection, so at first, going small meant a lot of Flonase and a neti pot. Yay.
Now that I’m starting to feel like a person again going small has meant things like painting Ikea shelf bins, baking focaccia, organizing my Disney pin collection, and planning an outdoor neighborhood movie night.
Going small has been great, but a person can only do so many menial projects before craving something more; I’m ready to introduce something a little bigger into my life, hence, talking about mental health and other vulnerable topics online, which lemme tell ya is incredibly frightening, but hopefully a little liberating too.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m still going to invest absurd amounts of time and energy into DIY projects around the house, I have too many recently-bought art supplies to ditch the practice entirely.
I had intended to go back to school in the fall, but that may not be an option anymore because — say it with me this time — there’s a pandemic on. My future plans were already hazy, but this is a level of uncertainty that the world as we know it hasn’t encountered in our lifetimes.
It’s terrifying.
But you already know that.
So here’s to focusing on what I can control: art projects, baking some fantastic bread, and starting a blog.
