My Retreat To Romance
The pandemic has triggered a wave of reflections about how hard it is to stay at home, but many of us have been doing it for years.
I originally shared a version of this story on Episode 131 of the Stories We Don’t Tell Podcast.
As of last week, I’ve officially read 200 romance novels. Most of them have been set in 19th century England, although occasionally characters travel to Europe or America. Almost all of the heroes and heroines have been aristocrats, which I find comforting and appalling at the same time. But the funny thing is that I don’t think I’d ever read a romance novel before I began living most of my life at home three and a half years ago.
That’s when I got sick, and I couldn’t keep up with my life anymore. My body began to misbehave in sudden and unexpected ways, my brain grew foggy, and I became extremely unreliable in a way that was antithetical to everything I’d ever cared about.
At first, I believed that if I could just catch up on all the sleep I’d been missing, then my body would bounce back from its apparent burnout. I ate only the most nourishing foods and I slept whenever I needed to and I hoped that eventually, inevitably, things would get better.
