Most people I’m in direct communication with are kind of enjoying having the order to stay home, thanks to our new popular friend Corona. As one of the most introverted of introverts, I like it too.

In theory.

Heck, I’m living my very best life.

In theory.

Yet here in the real world, by the time I’m turning out the lights each night, I’m nearly downright depressed.

There’s not much that I’m particularly struggling to live without. I don’t miss going into work. I don’t need much human contact to feel loved or fulfilled. Nothing huge in my life has been destructed. I even have a legitimate excuse to not run all of my least favorite errands. Procrastination made easy.

Instead, I just get to stay around the house, working and creating and doing my own thing on my own schedule. Literally the dream.

But I’m unhappy. And my unhappiness makes me annoyed with myself because there’s no reason to be unhappy, which makes me even more unhappy.

I feel like my life has come to a grinding halt and that I’m simply being stagnant and complacent – a state I easily fall into. I feel like I’m not putting myself out there or being social enough. That I haven’t done anything recently that I feel great about or proud of. That I’m allowing myself to close out the world and fall too deeply into my own mind like I’ve done in previous unhealthy seasons. That I’m pulling myself in this tight little ball and won’t be able to bounce out of it when the time comes.

I put all these normal expectations on myself during these not-normal times, so I constantly feel like I’m wholly and utterly failing as a person.

Until my mind swings the other way. I remind myself that I get a pass for my outward behavior, or lack thereof. That this is my time to shine as a professional homebody. That staying home and being with nobody but myself is my current calling in life. A calling that I freakin’ excel at during every moment in the history of ever except for March and April 2020, evidently.

So then I start to feel guilty for all the things I’m not creating. So many times in regular life, I’ve longed for even a week off to knock some serious projects out. An entire month would be a dream. Time is such an expensive commodity, and suddenly I’ve been handed a giant lump of it. This is the time to do it all.

Guys, I’ve been home for twenty-eight days now. That means I basically should have had time to write three novels, upload a thousand items to my Etsy shop, paint enough pictures to fill the Louvre, tackled that sewing project I keep putting off, spruced up my website, written daily blog posts, created tons of new Instagram content, chronicled each day in fine detail for my journal, learned piano well enough to use for songwriting, picked up French, started a minimum of three totally new hobbies, and my house should definitely be spotless on top of it all.

But, uh, surprise! That’s not the case.

I am working on stuff all the time – like, I haven’t even watched a single thing on Netflix in the past twenty-eight days besides binging Tiger King in one afternoon – but it still feels like I’m not doing enough. That I should have more to show for it. Or that, at the very least, I should be using this period of time for creating something unique or out of my ordinary creative routine that I effortlessly fit within my “regular” schedule.

I’m only pointlessly beating myself up. Letting myself live in the shame of the constant lie that lives in my head that I will never do or be enough.

All day, I rationalize these things, and just as easily as I’m explaining them out to you, I explain them out to myself again and again. My brain gets it. But I’m still sad. It still doesn’t feel like enough. I don’t feel like enough.

It’s stupid easy to fall into holding ourselves to unreasonable expectations.

This is a time for grace. Grace upon grace. For ourselves, for our coworkers, for the people we’re holed up with indefinitely, for strangers at the grocery store. None of us knows what we’re doing or how to do this or what the “right” answers are. One day at a time.

Don’t hold your neighbor to normal expectations during not-normal times.

Don’t hold yourself to normal expectations during not-normal times.

We’re all going to be okay.

In other news, I literally just noticed I can change the text color and now I’m resisting the urge to make all of this pink, but I think I’m going to settle for this paragraph only. Isn’t it so fun though? Bless my heart.