Meditations of an anxious soul in quarantine - Silver Spring, MD - Day in the Life - Photographer

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This time has been hard. It’s been raw, it’s been fraught with difficulty and tenuous emotions. And amidst the pain I am filled with gratitude. There are days when I’ve been brought to tears and there have been other days where I watch my life, as if from the outside and all I feel is a sense of droning numbness amidst the chaos. The news is dialed down and I watch out the window at those that pass as I feel somehow trapped within the walls of my anxious mind. During this time, relationships have been woven closer together and still social relationships are simultaneously strained. 

This time has made us all realize what is important and it has, I hope, made us better.

I realize now, that I had been trying to do too much. Before COVID-19, I had been seeing too many people and packing my schedule in an effort to do all-the-things. And that inevitably, this practice was not facilitating healthy boundaries or balance. I had not been spending enough quality time with my own family or myself for that matter. 

Family Photography

This realization struck me when my youngest started school back in January. Being the mother of two young children and realizing too slowly that the idea that I advocate for myself was important, I was elated when both girls were suddenly in school. I relished in those extra minutes where I was not pulled in every direction. I was able to sweat out any stress in downward dog and when feeling industrious, trip through the woods, my favorite podcast humming in my ears. After six years of around the clock parenting, I suddenly found I had time to pour myself another cup of coffee and even pour over a magazine.

Don’t get me wrong, it was fun for the first week. We were cautious and it was new and exciting and we were prepared, had been preparing for something just like this but different somehow. In those first weeks, I took to teaching the children at home and like a well rehearsed play (only improv) I impressed myself with my stamina and creativity. Soon however, I became wise to the reality of a child's attention span and my own level of impatience. Quarantine quickly lost its charm. 

Now, as quarantine day 150 approaches and I have not yet ventured out beyond the grocery store, I can feel the cold of isolation setting in. The word unhinged comes to mind.

As we await a vaccine, we mourn the loss of life and of our way of life and even still, as we view the society we thought we had lived in, we have grown to see a divide so deep that we often feel betrayed by our own shortsightedness. And I was just beginning to gain some independence. 

Day in the Life - Meghan LaPrairie Photography

But it was a start. Those morning yoga sessions that I leaned into a little more because I had the time, allowed me to realize how much time I had been giving to everyone else. My self-confidence began to grow and the anxieties which had crept up on me, hanging like fog and settling dense and impenetrable on my chest were slowly lifted. And now these practices have become my solace.

So now when I wake, the insecurities thick in my view, there are spliced seconds of realization that my not being good enough is all a lie I choose to believe and how on a good day, which is most days if I’m being honest, I’m fine. And until I feel truly okay, I continue to dose myself with every hippie tincture I can find as I binge episodes of Star Trek Next Generation until I can again see past the insurmountable tasks.

Brené Brown once said, “What separates privilege from entitlement is gratitude.”  And as I think on this and on my privilege from the safety of my home that I get to be inside of and work from, all I can feel is immense gratitude.

(These images are from April. The text is from August. Sometimes it is a process—this process.)