A new saga about an introvert heroine is out on the shelf.

She is going to save the world. Only this time, she doesn’t need to get out her comfort zone.

She gets ready: carefully, she picks her weapons (two or three heavy books, pens and pencils and her bullet journal) and armour (blankie and a pillow for her ass).

She gets ready from her (pillow) fort to strike.

Save the world. Stay inside.

*****

TW: Anxiety, Depression

It’s day 16 of my self-isolation, which officially begun when work closed the office and send us working from home. In fairness, my quarantine looks like many of my winter Sundays: jammies all day, college assignments, some Netflix, a shower to then change myself in a clean jammies. That doesn’t mean this situation is not impacting my mental health, but being introvert and having fought with a weak mental health most part of my life, I know how to cope. Mostly.

I had a tiny panic attack yesterday. I hadn’t had one in years.

I cut my hand while trying to cut a bit of Parmigiano, a scratch really, and at first I felt dizzy, then my eyes filled with black spot, my breathing became heavy and it felt a bit much for a tiny scratch on my hand – damn, Parmigiano! I was able to control it pretty quickly: all those quarantine yoga is already paying off, but it highlighted how easy it is to trigger me right now.

And that made me think how many people are going to face anxiety, panic, depression, loneliness, hopelessness for the first time and not knowing how to cope with it.

I’m not going to write a post on “hacks on how to get out sane from this pandemic from someone who regularly lives in isolation”. No. I leave that to the professionals, I’m barely able to hold together my routines at the moment – routines that helps me coping.

This is just a collection of few quarantined thoughts… And I know, the worst will come later, when I’ll have to go back to “normal life”. I look forward to that, in particular as this 2020 was meant to be an exciting one and I hope I can pick up things where I left before this pause, but it will be hard to go back to people because the more I’m on my own the more I want to stay on own.

Damn, just give me those cats and let me be, 2020!