Being Quarantined Means I Have Less Time, Not More

Daily publishing is going to have to go by the wayside for a while

Although I definitely have sympathy for people who have been sheltering at home by themselves for an extended period, I could actually go for a couple of days of isolation just about now — a week at least, and maybe more. Being holed up with three other people means I don’t have near enough time to be by myself or to do all the things that I would like to do — like writing.

Now that my elderly mom has moved in with us, I’m finding that I’m not only helping her with self-care needs but I’ve also become her social secretary. I’m happy to do whatever I need to in order to have her enjoy being here with us, but it’s sure taking up a lot of my time and bandwidth. Some of her friends call my cell phone so they can FaceTime. Others call the landline and I have to help her put it on speaker so that she can hear them, and sit nearby to translate, in case she can’t.

Mom’s typing is slow and full of errors so I’ve taken over helping her answer email. I do appreciate that it’s important for her to keep in touch with her friends and that this eases her transition away from the home that she’s lived in for the last 43 years, but it’s kind of taking over my life. And then there’s her memoir project, which she’s been working on for years, and is now in final editing. I’m helping with that too, because, well, it involves the computer — a device that she’s been using for at least 15 years but still doesn’t quite know how to work.

I’m enjoying hearing more of her life stories and assisting her with something that is important to her, but it’s all taking up a lot of room in my daily life. Writing has become something that I do in bits and pieces in between all the other multi-tasking that I’ve got going. Sometimes I write in the evening after she’s gone to bed, but by then I’m so tired that it’s probably not my best work.

I did that the other night while decompressing with a glass of wine (or two), and in the morning was a little surprised to find that I had published something I knew I’d been working on but had totally blanked on actually sending to print. Not good! It turns out that too tired, plus distracted, plus alcohol isn’t a great combination.

I’ve been writing every day and publishing on most days for over 6 months and I’d gotten into a rhythm with that which worked for me. What I’m realizing is that this isn’t sustainable for the foreseeable future. I had set a readership and income goal for myself and I’ve been meeting that, but it’s not something that I need to survive. I have other income streams. I’ll be fine if that drops way off. It’s more of a blow to the ego than anything else or an admission that I can’t “play the game of Medium” at the same capacity that I was at before when circumstances were different. No big deal, really. That’s all a self-devised construct anyway.

I could write a big sex story that gets a lot of residual reads, like the one I wrote in early January about Double Penetration that is still getting a lot of traffic, but there isn’t a lot of hot sex going on in our lives right now. Even though James and I escaped to the shower this morning when everyone else was still sleeping and steamed it up pretty good, I just am not usually in the frame of mind to write about such things right now. I do have plenty of stories in my memory banks that might fit that bill, but I don’t necessarily have the right mindset or space to write about them at the moment. It’s kind of dampening to try to write explicitly when my mom is sitting next to me, and I don’t write about sex just to get traffic anyhow. I write about it when it’s what is there asking to be written about, so I’m not about to start forcing that as a topic just to keep my stats up.

To compound matters, I’ve just heard from Haley Ballard, the photographer behind the Topless For Equality project who asked me several months ago to collaborate with her on a book. She has the interviews she did to accompany each photograph in transcript form now that she’s had more time on her hands at home, and Haley is ready for me to start working on my part. I need to go through each interview transcript and start figuring out how that fits into the larger book concept. It’s going to take time and focus — something that I’m already a bit short on these days, but I’m ready to put my attention there and I’m looking forward to getting that ball really rolling.

All this is to say, I’m not going to be publishing nearly as much on Medium in the near future. I’m saying this, perhaps more for me than for anyone else. I appreciate my readers and the nice feedback I get from so many of them but I’m not under any illusion that my voice is integral to anyone else’s life. So much of the writing that I do is a way for me to process what’s going on for me or what I’m thinking about and this is no different. It’s really me publicly coming to terms with the fact that I can’t keep up this pace, and giving myself permission to slow it down for a while.

I’ll still be here, reading and commenting and writing plenty. It just won’t be at the levels that I’ve been at for the past 6 months and that’s going to be just fine. Everything changes and shifts and I know that the way the River is flowing often doesn’t make sense at the moment but in hindsight, it totally looks like it was all supposed to happen just that way. I’m trusting that this is the case right now too. I’m feeling a little bit overwhelmed right now and wishing that I could have a little bit less of a hectic existence, so I’m just doing what I need to do to keep it all together and still keep my sanity.

It’s all good — I’m just talking to myself — getting ready for the next phase of things and looking forward to whatever they may bring. None of this was quite what I’d planned, but that’s the way life often goes. Better to embrace it than to keep banging my head against a brick wall.