.SOMETIMES RAW.

I don’t know why you’re waking up in the middle of the night. I don’t know if you’re unintentionally insensitive and therefore more likely to accidentally offend someone. I don’t know if, by clinical definition, you are in fact paranoid, but I do know that you’re afraid. You might be wondering why I brought you here but I invite you to absorb what I have to say. Ask deeper questions. Once you get to an answer the paralysis starts to melt away. You will know when your body releases and relaxes. The room you’re in gets brighter, your body feels lighter and, if you’re lucky, you remember what it’s like to be alive. Focused on what will go right, not just what could go wrong. The hardest thing you’ll have to do from here is to nurture this. In the middle and the end, it’s all we’ve got.

Do some people get life wrong? Some look miserable even though a situation is perfect. They are miserable and angry about nothing in particular. Remember, time is precious. You should “corona-know” this by now. We are our harshest critics. But it does not have to be this way. So much of the power we give away to doubt, fear and shame stems from our vanity. We crave for individuality in this sea of humanity and have this instinctual urge to glorify our struggles. We try to convince ourselves that once we have overcome this immediate obstacle in front of us our life will get infinitely better. Guess what? It won’t.

Life and certain tough situations make us more resilient so we can squarely face a harder problem than the one before it. This endless struggle wears us down and we keep feeding the lie of the finish line, a place where there is no adversity. Our constant pursuit, and failure, to arrive here allows this echo chamber of our soul to become polluted with discontent. And this disillusionment marks the beginning of a lifelong “war” some wage with themselves. A war with no end and no purpose other than to reduce our self-worth. Things could be a lot easier.

Goethe said, “Happiness is in overcoming unhappiness. The worst nightmare is a long, long row of sunny days.” But we cannot accept this worldview because it exposes us to the unknown . A journey with no destination. Imagine shining a light at the seat of your soul after a lifetime of darkness only to discover an all-consuming sterile emptiness. There is no broken compass. There is no blind guide. There are no demons. There is only the self and the consequences of the choices you made. “But what if….,” you may ask.

What if the ones we love leave us and take our home and peace, and give us darkness? If we live fighting a war inside of us every day. We are miserable. If we are miserable in a relationship but we stay because of X, Y, and Z which are no real reasons we are afraid of what the future holds. What if the ones who do stay drink from our well of sorrows hoping to fix us but instead drown in our brokenness? Because all we really want is to be free of this one person. And we live blaming ourselves for not being enough for them, too. We can never be enough but just be enough for yourself. What if it just some fake kindness and then they stab us in the back? And we live trying to save us from ourselves and them. What if we cry and there is nobody to hear our suffering? And we live hoping we will be proven wrong but the silence is deafening. What if how we get better is how we are with ourselves when we are alone? And we live becoming a version of us someone special in our life would have been proud of. Like our grandma. Or mother. And then after all of this living, we die believing we mattered for a brief moment in time to someone long enough to be remembered. But did we live? Did we enjoy life to the fullest? Did we love someone unconditionally? Do we even know what love really is and means?

Or think about this: Can someone else’s tragedy open your eyes? A friend of mine got diagnosed with breast cancer and said the other day that, after months of chemotherapy and surgery, doctors have not found new cancer cells in her body. She wants to hug the entire world. Her story moved me. Going through something insane like cancer at this time must be tough and doesn’t this make your own little problems such as being stuck inside for a couple of days/weeks seem like no big deal?

Yesterday I looked out the window and saw a man leading a woman (husband and wife I think) through the deserted street I live in. They were both blind with these vision-impaired badges around their arms. And as my heart began to feel pity for them I saw something remarkable. Both of them had the most splendid smiles on their faces. As he took her hand and carefully navigated their way around he probably said something that made her beam. A joke perhaps to lighten things up. Unfortunately, I was not able to hear it but it must have been beautiful. And I am glad I stood at my window long enough to see this moment unfold. This is love. Simple. Unadorned. Wholesome. Untiring. And guess what? When there is love in your heart, there is nothing to see nor miss. There are no misinterpretations. Only beauty and comfort to enjoy every single day in each other’s company. Love is what I need and get these days.

At this point, five days in of being stuck at home but who is counting, I can curse in headlines, right? The rules are out the window, there are no best practices, the protocol is to wing it like a pigeon on wheels. I have spent the majority of today oscillating between my son’s room and my living room where I have set up my desk to write and work. My son has been acting out, which is not surprising because we have been home for five consecutive days taking distancing and the quarantine pretty seriously in as cooperative a manner as is possible. I am learning from him on a daily basis. He is both, introverted at times and extroverted, meaning his energy is derived mostly from interaction with others (single child) and through the lens of his current social circle (me: his mom). This energy is building, and building some more, but it cannot be dispensed, so he is acting out. As such, he has endured two silent treatments in the past 24 hours. In some ways retreating to this makes me feel like I am surrendering, waving the white flag, giving up. We are keeping our routine of getting up, having breakfast, taking showers. Having a designated place to be alone and to set (emotional) boundaries. But I am reaching my single-parenting limits. I knew that having a child was going to test my resilience. That ideally, it would have been wonderful to commit to breathing through discomfort, but that in practice, it would be far more challenging. I did not know, however, that my child would, at a tender 6-year-old, be so acutely aware of the fact that he was testing my resilience. People, I am newly convinced that manipulation is a genetic mutation.

The rest of the day was mostly spent grinding teeth, making zucchini spaghetti and lathering the aforementioned in a creamy sauce between skyping with my parents, being on the phone with a Canadian bank for 50! minutes, texting with friends, slack conversation, cleaning my son’s room again (it looks like a meteor hit it), my hair getting pulled out by my son (he was giving me head massage to relax), cleaning the entire apartment, doing laundry, cleaning the windows and answering a curiously high volume of emails from this blog. Per the food preparation, by the way, how do you, while trying to get anything done at home, take care of your child also make three nutritional meals and clean pots/pans/dishes without watching the entire day pass you by feeling like you have run a marathon only to find you basically have not moved?

And to this point, if we are truly headed towards “we won’t be permitted to leave our homes under any circumstances that are not essential), how do we move? Do you move at all? For example yesterday, it was borderline. I needed to get some groceries, too so we decided to talk a little stroll around our lovely neighborhood. Just to see how things are. Or how things were. We walked to the closest playground which was closed of course. My son lost it at this point. He needed to run around. Like NEEDED it if you know what I mean. I bribed him with ice cream from the store so we moved on. He ran around a rather huge water fountain at a public place that looked deserted. Then a police car stopped next to us and asked where we are heading. The officers told me to please just go shopping and straight back home. I felt like a prisoner.

In regular “before Corona” life, leaving work typically connotes the end of the day, and even if you are freelance, there is some semblance of structure that separates working from home, from living from home but when there is no leaving, how do you demarcate? A bath? A glass of wine? A scheduled FaceTime plan with a friend or family? Reading? (G-sus I am reading so much these days) All of the above? What about starting your day? Do you just charge in, or are you keeping to a morning routine that facilitates the preservation of normal as you know it? And all this is what YOU try to do for yourself. Now add a child to this mess. Or children. Me, I could stay in bed all day with books and coffee. My son, not so much.

I know the situation is escalating. That the circumstances are dire, that the projected number of Austrian deaths, both direct and indirect results of the virus are staggering and painful. And every time I sit down to write something, I freeze for a minute and ask myself what I could possibly have to say that’s worth being heard. When things make it past publish, that’s because I have put the doubt on mute, assuming that if I so badly desire not ignorance, but some sort of distraction, then perhaps you do, too? I know you know this, but these times are unprecedented, and it feels like an obligation of this platform to commit both the service of keeping you company, but also of absorbing and applying your feedback. What drives my desire to get the hell up and write every morning is exactly the same as it was years ago: I find the story in what it means to be alive right now. This means I have to sit and think and feel my way through incredibly uncomfortable fire hoops of analysis sometimes to come to terms with the harrowing recognition that I have only successfully accomplished the task if I am sure I feel like I just ran a marathon even though in the realm of physical space, but as mentioned before, I haven’t moved an inch. Or maybe I have moved an inch playing hide and seek with my son, I don’t really know, but here I am. Here we are. Trying to find the story in what it all means to be alive right now. And you know what it means to be within this squiggly creases of my brain inside my head behind the wrinkles on my forehead (they are actually indentations of experience) on the pillow of my bed, holding a cup of coffee, in the middle of Vienna/Austria, stocked with cans of Käferbohnen (some type of Austrian bean that is amazing), liters of almond milk, yes: toilet paper, and week’s worth of produce in my freezer and fridge to put to work to feed my son? It means……. It means…..

It means that I have been sitting here, stuck at this inflection point for exactly 57 minutes trying to detangle the wires of what is probably very simple. I have no fucking idea what will happen next. I don’t know how my child will achieve the stimulation and energy dispensing he requires every day for the next… for the next…. I don’t even know how long this will last! And honestly, I don’t even think I should scratch this surface yet. I have no fucking clue what the future of my personal life looks like in this spiral of felt unproductivity.

The thing about living in a city like Vienna is that our respective experiences of it are collections of the places we frequent. And without our places, the constellation of our experiences don’t point back to anything tangible. They are just memories, and we have nowhere to go. But home. It is just that in a city like Vienna, when home isn’t a house with a backyard, those places are it for a lot of us. Typing this made me sob. Those places are it for a lot of us. Those places and the people who run them. And the people who run the people. They become family. What happens to them? What are we going to do now? Honestly, we are in the same boat, you and me. Directlessly coasting around the same forlorn island trying to answer the ultimate question: how am I going to make it through this madness a little more palatable? Don’t tell me to meditate and breathe deeply Instagram. You don’t do this anymore after being in the same room with a six-year-old for 24 hours straight.

But hey, I will make the best out of this and keep trying to find the story in what it means to be alive. Being alive is pretty awesome. Then I will tell the story and think voraciously about how to make the next day a better one by exploring the spooky, old basement of my apartment building with flashlights.

Every time I pass people on the street, if I still pass people that is, they are talking about the same thing: the COVID-19 pandemic. It seems to be top of mind for everyone. People living across from me singing and playing instruments on the balcony in solidarity during the lockdown. It is a delight to listen to. It is also amazing to observe how people find a moment of joy in this moment of anxiety or insanity.

Right now, for my son and I, life feels ominous but semi-normal here in Vienna, Austria. My workplace shut down, Kindergarten and schools are closed as of today. Everything else is closed, too. Except for pharmacies and supermarkets. We avoid big public groups, including movie theaters, museums, book fairs, and all those good things. Now, playgrounds are closed. To make this craziness complete, I pinched a nerve in my lower back and can barely move. Very, very painful. But I guess it is better to stay inside anyway. We bought a couple extra boxes of pasta, beans, cereal, rice, and such things. We are greeting people with elbow taps or waves, instead of hugs and cheek kisses. I’m assuming that, in days or weeks, things will continue to tighten up. “Cancel everything,” says an Atlantic headline. “The bottom line: It is going to get worse,” said Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

It’s a very strange and scary feeling to helplessly wait to see what will happen. Will subways shut down? Will we mostly be staying home and just go to the store to buy more food? Besides tons of reading, writing and watching movies, we are using all this time to clean, rearrange, and declutter our apartment. Going through my things made me realize how unimportant most of the stuff is. How little we actually need. But, am I my stuff? What is stuff? How many bars of soaps and hand sanitizer should one own in this COVID-19 madness? As much as I usually appreciate a precise word, there is something satisfyingly vague about it. You can hate or love stuff. My stuff revolves around me like false confidence. Just like stuff, who I am changes depending on the context. My material possessions function more like additional information than a definition. I got rid of a lot of stuff today. That was before the pinched nerve.

But what about the human habit of defining ourselves by what we buy, which is a pressing issue in these Corona-days. Since the internet is our primary means of connection, we are sort of forced to perform ourselves online so that others can understand us quickly and in the ways, we would like. In this sense, we have become hyper-focused on what our stuff says about us. And who we can be if it changed. Who would I be if I had different stuff? When I accumulate more stuff or pare it down, do I change?

For me, those shifts temporarily transform how I feel, but I am not sure I myself am any different. If I throw out all my furniture, even though it is still great, and replace it with new stuff, I am still the same person. I am just me, with maybe better taste, a new cool leather couch, or less junk. But neither of those really inform who I am at my core. Guess what? I am very uncomfortable at the moment and in a lot of pain and a new leather couch would suck.

We are nuanced and mercurial creatures with desires and fears so deep and huge we can’t always express them. That is when stuff can help. Now go and buy that face-mask if it makes you happy. It can tell a story about our inner worlds that’s tangible, fragile and simple. Or show how scared we really are about this damn virus. It can help us draw conclusions about each other without sitting down for an hour and spilling our guts. Ideally, our stuff is informed by our values, too. It can reassure us of who we are, or bring us together because he/she likes that thing, too. That is not nothing, my friends. It is the power of non-verbal expression. When we are seen and known on a deeper level by the people around us and by ourselves or feel that way about others, I think stuff has a way of disappearing into the background, of becoming something we poke around in on our way to and from something, but never the destination itself.

In the end, the math isn’t simple, but it’s clear enough to me. Stuff is additive, occasionally helpful and comforting, but it isn’t everything. Not in these crazy times and not ever. Look at how a virus can transform the world into great chaos. Who cares about that $900 purse you bought last week. It is a medium with limits. It’s a response to who you are, not who you are. And when we equate those two things or invert them, I think we risk losing sight of the fact that stuff is often the least interesting thing about us. Think about it. Think about what is really important. It is important to be prepared. It is important not to freak out and to rather stay calm. And, for me, to be able to move again and take care of this little person who follows me for the last six years. These days, it is better to stay inside, wash hands one more time so we can hopefully move on and get back to “normal”.