I keep staring at my laptop screen thinking, I should write something! C’mon! Blogging is good for my mental health and God knows my mental health desperately needs all the help it can get.

And my brain goes: ______________________

Or: a very quiet thrum of white noise.

Or: Gnurple Blug fantatally fuck.

Yep. Yeah. Wow.

I feel bad for my therapist.

I had therapy today. We tried to do it online but the website that we were using for a “secure confidential therapy session” did not allow for sound. I could hear my therapist’s voice, but she could not hear mine; and then she played with the settings and she could hear my voice, but I could not hear her voice anymore. And since sound is critical for therapy (unless both parties are fluent in American Sign Language) we switched to Facetime.

Quick tangent: holy shit, I should try learning a little sign language while we are sheltering at home! There must be something on Youtube, right? I bet my kids would like to do that with me…

Back to this really articulate blog post: we switched to Facetime, I vented about this strange new reality, and by the end of my session, I felt much better. (The bar is low, folks, but still, I’ll take anything!) But as we were finishing my session, my therapist mentioned that she thinks this Strangeness is traumatic for everyone.

That’s when I realized, Holy shit, ALL of my therapist’s clients (patients?) are in crisis. ALL OF US.

Usually, in a given week or month, some of us are in crisis, some of us are “great! spiffy! making tremendous progress!” and then a bunch of us are somewhere in between. But right now, we are all – including my therapist – living through an unprecedented shit storm.

When I am dealing with some Big Issue, my therapist can usually recommend a few great resources. Over the past few years, she has hooked me up with the Calm App, Fr. Richard Rohr, Pema Chodron, and Miribai Starr – and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. She always knows a book or podcast that can help me process whatever life throws my way.

But this? Sheltering at home during a pandemic for weeks on end with no guaranteed end date? No one has written a memoir about this yet! There will certainly be dozens if not hundreds of Covid-19 memoirs written in the years to come, but right now, we are living the memoir. We are figuring this shit out minute by minute.

No wonder my brain has gone into “Gnurple Blug” mode! Every single minute of every single day is bursting with a sense of “well what the fuck now and are we really sure this is not some elaborate prank? Because it’s easier to think that Ashton Kutcher has punked us all than to digest the concept of a pandemic that has effectively hit the PAUSE button on life as we know it.”

Whew. Once again, having written a blog post, I actually feel a little better.

My poor brain, however is still very much in Gnurple Blug Fantatally Fuck land. Oh well!