16 August 2020: I've written about "balance" before, in the sense of trying to balance my devotion to work with some sense of self-care or life outside of work. That project is, for a bunch of reasons, even more complicated at the moment. How can I not think obsessively about work when it's so fluid, fraught, and uncertain? And when I know it will require more time and effort this semester? But I can't only think about that, or I will just spiral. I need an existence outside of work. Yet! What is there when my world is still shut down in so many ways (can't visit friends, can't see a movie, can't go to a restaurant, etc., etc.)?
But there's another kind of balance I've been thinking about lately, also connected to self-care. I was just texting a dear friend about it. We are both anxious about our respective universities opening in about a week.
How strange to want something so desperately but also not want it. How strange to think about all the ways it can go wrong and obsess over them while clinging to the little ways it might feel good to be back.
This reflects, I think, a rhetorical/mental pattern I find myself moving through again and again: as I texted my friend, "I am--sometimes in the same breath--going from 'everything is awful' to 'but it's okay.'" And both are true, aren't they? Vigilance and survival (perhaps literally?) depend on that uneasy balance. I am so sad, overwhelmed, and filled with despair. But I am also blessed, safe, and filled with hope, (even if that hope is sometimes almost entirely based on a vaccine that is months and months away).
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