I have been on bed rest for the last two weeks, my bedrest was accompanied by some very strong pain medications to manage the pain I was in. Though very helpful, the meds, I am not a fan the psychedelic effect of borderline starvation and heavy pain medication combined. The last two weeks I struggled to eat and that coupled that with my pain medication, meant odd things. It began with some interesting conversations with people real and imagined. Then followed with some very weird dreams, one of which, someone tried to murder me, several times. My favourite was a really wild to sing along with Winnie the Pooh and Piglet. I really enjoyed that moment there.

All those fun moments apart, something has weighed on me heavily, how we heal physically and psychologically. I hate the concept of bed rest, I don’t like it. I get bored and I want to do things. I want to work. I want to talk to people. I want to engage and often I would. When I before the pandemic, when I would have the flu or be sick in any form, I would still go to work or I would work from home, actively engaging in the world. Not engaging with world for me felt like giving up. It felt like I was telling my body and whatever illness was there that it had won.

This has been the challenge of the last two weeks, I physically could not move. I couldn’t participate, I was emotionally exhausted and drained. It is one thing to be sick but quite another to be sick in a pandemic especially with numbers rising. It so difficult to choose isolation when you’re in need of comfort, but it was something that I also needed.

As it turns out needed that mental space of quiet of just me and the whole time I was on bedrest, aside from having a very intense conversation with a spider, more than this may be later. I kept thinking about the energy waste on unnecessary things. There’s someone who has lived, rent free in my mind for seven months and somehow I can’t seem to push them away and the medication definitely brought them to the forefront. One day, I actually thought I could see them my bedroom and that was terrifying. I mean they murdered me many times in my dream already can the leave my hallucinations alone. In the last two weeks I have had a rainbow of emotion with this person. Then something hit me, my energy mind space needed proper cleansing. So I took time off from social media and my phone just to really think about where I want my energy.

This four day detox has me thinking about life after all this. When I’m hopefully well again and this, pandemic comes to a place that it is all manageable. How will I be with people? How will I react? I have always had a bit of an antisocial sense to me, hard to believe, but it’s true. When I’m with the people for work perspective I put all my energy into it and I engage with them. After that, I just want to run away and hide. Lockdown was made for someone like me. It gave me the excuse to run away and hide without having to apologize or make up excuses.

I could be in my isolation and communicate with people the only I find super comfortable through text messages and sometimes phone calls. I didn’t have to sit in their presence and get physically way down by their energy. I didn’t have to keep reminding myself if I’m smiling, if I’m being fully present, if I’m listening hard enough. I didn’t have to remind myself not to drift off to that place in my mind where characters of the stories, want to tell me about their plots and narratives. I didn’t have to keep pulling myself back to make sure that I am entertaining the people in my presence and that for me had been the most freeing thing.

When all this is done, how do we create balance in the way we engage with the people around us. Where when we are fully charged and ready, we can give them a hundred percent of who we are over time. Then when we need to recharge that, they understand and let us retreat into our corners and it’s okay to be quiet even in company. We can sit with people we care about and they can understand that sometimes we want to be in their presence but we don’t want to speak. I shouldn’t be anxious with friends because I am worried they need my A game that the very thought of leaving my house petrifies me.

I am not sure we have been given the right tools to manage our social anxieties especially around people we care about. It’s okay to know what to do about strangers but it’s the people you love that actually creates more anxiety. So, how do we manage our social anxieties and make sure that we have been allowed to take the breaths, that we have to take so we can function in the world?

My mental renter is creating so much anxiety for me and I am struggling to get them to leave. It’s easy to say just stop thinking about them and they are not worth your energy but unfortunately it isn’t. My head can’t help it, she pops in without my consent and I have work hard to force her out, every day and I need better tools to confront those very demons that allow her in. What has been helpful is beginning my day every day with twenty minutes of head space meditation and taking lots of breaths.

I still don’t know if I will adapt well to the world when it goes back to whatever normal looks like. I don’t even know if my anxieties can handle my mental renter when I accidentally run into her in the world. But I live in hope that I will heal but physically and psychologically from the scars that plague me.