I'm definitely not alone in finding the current pandemic a time for difficult
emotions, but it's taken me a while to unpick the emotions I've been
having. Having managed this, however, I'm documenting them here - as a record
for myself, to save me repeating myself when explaining them to people who ask
how I'm feeling, and in the hope that it might provide some ideas for people who
are still trying to work their feelings out; you might have something in common
with me.
## Before
First, some history.
As I'd mentioned a while ago, just when this was starting, [available time is an
issue for me](http://www.snell-pym.org.uk/archives/2020/03/15/time-2/). I've
been on that kind of busy schedule since we moved home in January 2012, and
decided that we would keep the kids in the same school, rather than disrupting
their lives with a change of school (and they school they were in is rather
good, we didn't want to lose that). This meant the start of spending two hours
every day on school runs, on top of a full-time job; and having moved house
greatly improved Sarah's opportunities to expand her career, which then meant a
lot of weekends spent supporting her in that (she's disabled, so depends on me
to drive, carry stuff, and support her medically - thanks to a traumatic brain
injury several years ago, she needs somebody around who knows how to recognise
and deal with her seizures). Moving house was the right thing for us as a
family, on various levels (the situation we were in before was... problematic),
but it's been a net increase in stress for me personally, and in many ways I
feel like my life went on pause then. Please note that I wasn't forced to do this - I have volunteered my time for my wife and children because I believe that's the right thing to do, and my only complaint is that bad luck has put us in a situation where there are so many things we need done that only I can do or that the others can only do with me present, and that the economics of the automobile mean we're in a society that expects people to be able to travel to far away places at the drop of a hat, allowing economies of scale to increasingly centralise things in space and therefore making them further and further away from the population. *I* have chosen to put my life on pause rather than deprive the three other people in my family of their opportunities to grow. It sucks, but it's not their fault.
I *used* to be a lot more involved in open-source software projects - [my
own](https://www.kitten-technologies.co.uk/), [Chicken
Scheme](http://call-cc.org/), and various other smaller things. I was making
progress on writing projects, and gestating ideas for other projects that,
either years later, remain as headings in my `tasks.`[`org`](https://orgmode.org/) file.
This hasn't been good for my self confidence. At first, I didn't realise how
much the changes in routines would impact me, and failed to distinguish
transient kerfuffle caused by a house move for permanent changes. And so I spoke
confidently of things I was going to do, then failed to do them. I'm not sure to
what extent my friends were actually disappointed in me compared to me just
feeling guilt and shame over this, but either way, I went from confidently
offering to do things for people and communities to slinking away from them in
shame; and the rewarding feeling of having made somebody's life better, which
has always been very important to me, was gone. I cried when I realised that the only free day I'd reserved for making my friends' wedding rings was actually already reserved for going out to an event (they got married without them; I still want to make them for them, but without the pressure of the deadline, and now feeling guilty about the whole thing, I've yet to actually do this).
Sure, I was doing a lot for my wife and children, and still running my Cub pack (albeit at a bare-minimum level as I was struggling to do it justice) but that's different. When I
invented something for somebody, I was using *my special skills* to make a
difference. When I am driving people around and carrying boxes, I am doing
things I do no better than most people, probably a bit worse than average; I
feel I could be replaced and the result would probably be an improvement.
I became dependent on work to get that satisfaction, but that's risky. Due to
moving house, and the events that forced us to move house in the first place, we
were in debt. With that and the restriction that I needed to be available to be
able to drop a child off at school between 8:30am and 8:45am, and pick her up
again at 3:10pm and get her home, available job opportunities were driven
largely by the practicalities of earning enough, flexible hours, and working
from a location compatible with the school run travel timings (a situation that
I'm sure will be familiar to working parents worldwide - I know the school run
burden falls disproportionately on mothers, which is evident from looking at the
faces waiting at the school gates with me, but that's another issue
entirely). Life satisfaction wasn't really able to be near the top of the
priority list, but I was lucky to have recently started a job at a local firm
making database software - one of my passions! - and they were able to accept my
slightly wobbly timekeeping around school runs, so we were OK. OK, but not
great. For various reasons I spent a lot of time twiddling my thumbs and doing
really, really, tedious work because there was nothing else to do, career
progression wasn't really available, and eventually, the company was bought by
another and, after another year, closed down.
I bumbled between various jobs since then; perhaps the highlight was working for
a company undergoing some difficult changes, which I got to be instrumental in
helping them through. I got to think about the big picture, solve challenges
under pressure, the sort of thing I enjoy; but the market the company worked in
was something completely uninteresting to me. I was solving interesting human
challenges, but the technical challenges were pretty trivial. And, more
urgently, the company needed me to work in their office for normal hours (and
the office was too far from home to do the full school run); I'd managed this
through an arrangement with another family where I'd take their kid into school
in exchange for them bringing my kid home, but their kid was going to leave the
school soon so it couldn't last; and I was nervous being away from home for so
long each day, not able to keep an eye on Sarah's health.
A particularly low period was when I had a colleague at another job who
disagreed with me a lot. That's not a problem in itself - I find interacting
with people with very different philosophies refreshing, as it helps me to
question my own biases, and I can often learn things from them - but this person
unfortunately combined "widely different philosophy" with "contempt for other
philosophies", which meant that they referred to my opinions and choices with a
certain jeering disrespect, that:
1. Really, really, angered me. It touched a raw nerve.
2. Kinda clashed with the whole guilt/insecurity thing I'd built up about not
doing open source work any more or, indeed, doing anything particularly
technically challenging at work. Because: What basis *did* I have to have
confidence in my opinions any more? What did I actually have to show for my
supposed wisdom and experience? All I'd done for years has been trivial
stuff.
3. Somewhat implied an attack on my *competence*, not just an attack on my
particular idea. It was hard not to take "That idea is laughably stupid in a
way that's so obvious I don't even need to explain why" as a personal attack.
4. Consisted of sweeping generalisations ("It's simpler") or appeals to
subjectivity ("That's ugly"), which are easy to say but require time and
energy for me to refute through logical argument. And when I took the time to
explain my reasoning at length, he'd usually just go quiet. But then continue
to give the same argument again in another context.
As an aside, the last point is a long-standing bugbear of mine. It's basically
the same problem as populists in the press offering simple-sounding explanations
for their opinions that, superficially, seem reasonable, common-sense, and based
in unarguable obvious facts - like "There's lots of foreign people doing jobs,
way more than there used to be, while we're facing falling wages, higher
unemployment, and over-stretched public resources. If we sent them home, there
would be more jobs for us!". There it is, in two sentences. I challenge you to
explain the real economic pressures causing the financial problems faced by many
in Britain today, and how immigration has stimulated our economy, or how
immigrants and their taxes are shoring up our public services, two
easy-to-understand sentences! I really, really, wish I was the kind of person
who could come up with snappy one-liners. I'm more of a "essay with sections"
kind of communicator. Which is great for explaining things to people, but bad for swaying their opinions. But, on with the essay...
So, yeah, I spent a lot of time struggling to find the energy to get out of bed
with that job; my workdays consisted of a mixture of attacks on my self-esteem,
and tedious work that didn't let me use my core skills so I felt pretty useless much of the time anyway.
So: There's some history as to my mental state *before* a pandemic came and
turned the world upside down.
## After
The horrible thing is that the lockdown has been *awesome* for me, and that fact
has also made it *terrible*. Here's why.
At first, it was like a sudden extra school holiday - no school runs, no taking
kids to their clubs. That's a good fifteen or so hours of life back a week,
meaning I'm largely getting enough sleep, and getting to spend more time on
cooking and housework so we're eating a better diet and the house is in a better
state than it usually is. Now, the school summer holiday is usually when Sarah's
weekend work gets busiest, so the increase in time during the week is usually
offset by the loss of weekends - but in the lockdown, that's not happened. At
the time of writing, I've had several consecutive weekends where, as well as
generally being under a lot less pressure from little things, and being
well-rested, I've had anything from half a day to a day to actually choose what
I'm going to do with my time.
For the first weekend, as usual, I had no energy so just slobbed around. And
then sparkles of [The
Enthusiasm](http://www.snell-pym.org.uk/archives/2019/11/04/enthusiasm/) began
to return. However, all I've been enthusiastic so far have been "infrastructure
projects": making shelves, tidying, making my [DC power breakout
box](http://www.snell-pym.org.uk/archives/2020/04/07/12v-dc-power-distribution/),
fixing my workshop roof, building myself a new desk. I think this is mainly
because these things have hung over me for a while (literally, in the case of
the roof...) as niggling annoyances with my environment that I want to fix.
But it has the downside that these *aren't* the
improve-the-world-and-make-people-happy projects I used to get so much out of. At best, writing about them might inspire others to do something similar, but that's a far cry from me making something for another person. I
am hoping that I'll be able to work through the list of infrastructure
annoyances and, with them not bothering me any more and a delicious new
workspace making me feel all refreshed and ready, I'll be able to face the world
and start working on my *real* projects again. I think/hope that this is just a longer-term evolution of the issue of needing time to decompress first.
So I'm *really enjoying* getting to work on projects because I choose to, but I've also been having nightmares about it, because:
1. I am terrified of it ending. If I can get through these initial
"decompression stages" and back into my natural state of doing cool things
and sharing them with people for a while, then sure, it'll have been a nice
break and will recharge my self-esteem and I'll be refreshed enough to return to the grindstone and might survive
another eight years of it without going insane. But if it all ends and I need
to return to my normal routines while I'm still in this transition phase,
waking up to the breathtaking possibility of doing *cool stuff* again then
having to stop before I get there... I'm not sure how I'll cope. Recent talk of schools reopening in three weeks' time gave me a cold sweat.
2. I'm also scared that I *have* "lost it" somehow, that my memories of being
awesome are just memories and I've fallen behind the state of the art /
gotten old and stupid / etc and won't actually do any cool stuff, even if I
try. That I'm doing all this infrastructure because I'm avoiding actually
doing cool things. This can become a self-fulfilling prophecy if I avoid doing cool things because I'm scared I'll fail, so I'm trying to be alert for that so I can nip it in the bud!
3. I'm worried that, through either of the above two points, I'll fail to do any of the amazing productive things I'm always moaning I don't have time to do during this period; and I'm so scared of being/appearing to be/worrying that people think I am the "empty promises person", talking endlessly of what they *could* do if only things that *weren't his fault* weren't stopping them.
4. I'm scared about making promises I'm going to do something - either by directly offering to do a specific thing for a person, or even just saying "I'm going to write my awesome system monitoring software and open-source it". Because I might well *not*.
5. And I'm feeling *really* guilty/ashamed that I'm *enjoying* something that is
*killing people* and *ruining lives* - and hoping that it never ends.
And on top of that, having enough sleep, and free time to think, also means that
I'm getting energy and time to think about stuff that I couldn't afford to think
about enough at the time. Yesterday evening I burst into tears because I was
going back over memories of the [2017
miscarriage](http://www.snell-pym.org.uk/archives/2017/11/11/miscarriage-from-the-fathers-eyes/); and today's a day I actually have some time to work on the workshop roof, but I'm struggling to muster the energy to do more than flop around again right now... So I'm doing a few minor projects, catching up on emails, and finishing editing this blog post.
So, yeah, that's what the pandemic has meant for me, so far. This probably
sounds decidedly whiny to people who've lost loved ones or are facing financial ruin, but this is what I'm personally facing right now!
Mon 20th Apr 2020 4:39 pm 
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By dsp, Fri 24th Apr 2020 @ 2:49 pm
This was an intriguing read. thanks for taking the time to organize into text problems that i'm sure others (and some of them myself) are facing. Probably you have investigated it already as a solution but here it goes...
When i was originally a teenager my mother who is a smart and successful person used this argument to help me get out from a hole from time to time "most problems can be solved with money, except for very hard problems which can be usually solved with lots of money" ;). At the moment i thought that this is a shallow way of thinking and that only shows the difference in quality of thought etc etc. you know. teenager stuff. But years afterwards i realized the essence of her argument. It was meant as a way to allow me to distance myself from the emotions that the problem brings and make me invulnerable to it, also reassuring that just something stupid and pointless such as "money" can be employed to just make it go away. The cool-headed state that this brought allowed me to tackle problems efficiently. So here is a suggestion: how about investigating the investment of hiring a friendly driver for the school run maybe originally a couple of days per week? there are people who will need the money and you need the time. Time is important and you shouldn't feel bad for wanting to reclaim it and for the virus stopping the insane pace of the society and allowing everyone to reflect a bit. It is really the time of your life :).