BEDA always seems to usher in a bunch of lists from me, doesn’t it? It’s easy for me to do when I’m pressed for time, but I feel a little bit disingenuous or lazy or cheap doing it so often.

So I thought I’d offer a really brief check-in, not in list-form. (There will certainly be more list content coming your way, so don’t fret.) That’s right, we’re going to try an old-fashioned stream of consciousness update!

This week was difficult but in a very different way than past weeks have been for me. It’s the first week where I felt I had the mental capacity to be fully engaged with work since my husband recovered, and since we have been in quarantine, if I’m being honest, since we had 2 weeks of anxiety and adjustment before my husband started feeling sick.

Not only did I have enough mental bandwidth to be more (if not fully) engaged with my work this week, I had a lot of guilt that I wasn’t more engaged with it earlier on. After all, this was my 6th week in quarantine, and that’s a long time to pass without being as productive as I can be. I’ve been struggling with feeling optimally productive at work for some time and actually found myself slipping into a state of flow more frequently this week, maybe because I was finishing up my latest project and my tasks left were very discrete and achievable. (Note to self: Always take the time to separate out tasks into discrete and achievable pieces of work.) However, I ran into a lot of roadblocks with finishing these tasks, partly because I’m really feeling the struggle of working with a distributed team right now.

Communication has been difficult and cumbersome. When I have a question for a teammate, I find myself waiting much longer for an answer. When my teammates have a question for me, I drop everything to hop into a Slack conversation or a phone call and that will take time, plus I require time to get back into my workflow. This feels extra draining for me, maybe because I’m an extrovert and I’m expending so much energy for this bare minimum amount of “social” interaction, that isn’t even that social because it’s for work and not for leisure.

On the bright side though, my evenings have been nice because I am trying to get myself to do something physical every evening and getting to spend time with my husband while he plays Witcher 3 (which has a really cool story and world) has been really fun. It’s not really a “normal” schedule still but more of a leisure one. There are other things I need to do but have been putting off because I guess I still don’t feel ready to go back to “normal” yet? I don’t know when I ever will, though, so I think this upcoming week I will try to resume my “normal” responsibilities.

Maybe.

I’m also trying to figure out how much I need to eat to actually feel satiated? In the beginning, it meant that I stopped eating sooner than I would have otherwise, where I would pile food on my plate and then push to finish it, but I think I am restricting my food a little too much on occasion because I do sometimes feel really hungry just a few hours later. I thought perhaps some healthy snacking would help, but so far I haven’t quite figured out the between-meals snacking in a way that makes me feel like I didn’t over-indulge, so I’m still trying to learn the right portion sizes for me and the right way to snack. I’d be lying if I said that my weight wasn’t something I think about even though I don’t weigh myself so much anymore because the scale is in the bedroom and I haven’t been in there since my husband got sick. I hit an all-time high weight a few months ago and I know it was the result of a lot of unhealthy habits, but 10 pounds is a lot of weight for me to gain in a year so we’ll get back to a healthier place soon, I can feel it.

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How was this past week for you?