putting down the rope

I’ve been gone for a while, I know.

I started a new job (hooray!) and I realized that I might need to press pause on the blog. I wasn’t sure if I could protect my privacy enough to continue writing so personally, when my job is working with patients in eating disorder treatment. I need to create some essential boundaries between the professional and the personal, and I didn’t know how this site factored into those boundaries.

So, for now, while I figure it out, I’ve removed my blog from any identifying social media sites. Because today I needed to write.

I’ve started this new job that I absolutely love and I’m finally working my extroverted muscle that had atrophied significantly in quarantine. But suddenly, my weekends have become difficult. Around the same time on Saturdays and Sundays since I started working, I sink into this depressively low mood. It only lasts a few hours each weekend evening, and it’s completely miserable. It doesn’t matter how great my week was, or even how great that morning had been…suddenly I lose interest in everything, and feel hopeless, unmotivated, and extremely bored. And it confuses the hell out of me.

But if you think about it, it makes perfect sense.

Isolation sucks when you’re an extrovert. This is what I’ve learned in quarantine, being immunocompromised and therefore at a much higher risk to be able to fight off this deadly virus. I’ve been stuck in the same house with the same person for almost a year now. I rarely leave the house. We get our groceries delivered. It’s winter, so we can no longer hang out safely with our few friends in town. It is so lonely.

When I have a week filled with meetings and fulfilling, meaningful work that energizes me and distracts me from quarantine, weekends throw me back into that isolation that I’ve been stuck in since March of last year. And now that my mind has been reminded that it’s an extrovert, when I reach the weekend where I can’t work that muscle, my mind gets confused and sad that it’s still alone at home.

I still don’t know how to prevent this dip in mood. Are any of you feeling this, too? How are you navigating your 11th month in quarantine? Thoughts are welcome in the comments below.

I hope you’re all hanging in there. Hopefully this ends soon.