Today is officially day 100 of quarantine, and I thought I’d do a small check-in to mark the occasion.I typically consider myself a textbook extrovert: I feel more energetic after social interactions, and long periods without them leave me feeling really low-energy and low-mood. In the past, this has been dangerous for me, leaving me stuck in a sad loop where I was too depressed to talk to my friends, which left me feeling lonely and more depressed. For years, I’ve joked that I could never “pull a Thoreau” and yeet myself into the woods to live alone in a cabin. (Never mind that he had his mother do his laundry.) No, I feel recharged after social interactions and long bouts without them are a sure way to feel lethargic and melancholy.

Preparation seemed necessary before shelter-in-place.

As luck would have it, I feel mostly the same as I did before day 1 of quarantine, but I’m not sure how.
Have I adapted to be less extroverted, less reliant on social interactions for my mental well-being? I really hope so, because being reliant on other people to feel recharged… is less than ideal.
Maybe I haven’t been this extroverted in a long while, but I was only holding onto this image of myself that was no longer accurate?

Maybe.
But I think quarantine has really just made me face some truths I’ve been avoiding about my coping mechanisms and the health of my social interactions since I’ve moved to New York.

Day 100 and I’ve gotten a lot farther than I thought I would in quarantine, but I had to hit a wall sometime and I am starting to feel like that time is now or fast approaching.

Anyway. Enough about me.

A second wave of outbreaks is cresting in China, where almost all of my family is, or is trying to go back to. Travel to China has been difficult, but especially from the home of the most coronavirus cases in the world.

I haven’t mentioned yet on this blog, but Memorial Day weekend triggered a resurgence in the Black Lives Matter movement after the murder of George Floyd. I think I haven’t slept well since. All the more hours awake to spend fighting for justice for George and for Breonna Taylor, whose killers are still working, and for Ahmaud Arbery and the much-too-long list of names of Black people who were denied the right to live while being Black. I’ll try to post resources here soon, but I’ve been EXTREMELY active on Instagram doing just that, so please reach out if you have a specific question or check my story highlights for more information, if you aren’t sure where else to get that information at this time.

This feels like a very old school… stream of consciousness… I shouldn’t even hit publish but I will kind of blog. But I am trying to live my life a little bit less hesitantly, a little bit less… apologetically.

And I feel like the world is on the edge of a precipice, getting ready to jump. What we’ll find at the bottom… no one knows. A big part of me is cynical about it: no long-lasting change will result, there will be so much backlash we may end up worse than we started, etc. etc. etc.

But.
I have to will myself to have hope. To have hope that things will get better and that I have a part to play in things getting better.

Anyway.
Above, enjoy this photo I took during my honeymoon last year. I celebrated my wedding anniversary last week and it was lovely. I recreated some of our favorite foods from Hawaii, and today I share one of my favorite quiet, passing moments: sitting in a rented convertible, top down, to watch the sun rise over the ocean, with the wind in my hair, the sun on my face. I have only left this building once since we began quarantining so these feelings are not as familiar as they once were but I’ll never forget the sensation of being in that moment. It was so blissful that it was almost electric. I am looking forward to more moments like that in the future.

This song has been stuck in my head, persistently and loudly. It drowns out many of my thoughts. Also, how did I not know that Filthy Frank became Joji??