Hi, how are you
I'm holding up. Barely, sometimes, but mostly together.
There's an order to my days because this is what I'm used to. I've worked from home for six years so I'm not losing track of weekdays or losing my sense of reality like a lot of other people because I don't have a commute to miss or coworkers to miss socializing with.
My office is next to my bedroom.
Podcasts are my commute.
Usually it's me and the cats and the silence of our house and it's glorious. I love working from home.
This is the easy part.
The other easy part is staying busy. Between my agency and my startup I have a never ending list of stuff to do, and because I cope with anxiety by creating structure and routines I'm using this time to focus and build them as much as I can.
We just hit a major milestone with HeyAlfa the other day that's going to blow people away.
(Never let a crisis go to waste, as they say.)
I've seen a lot of posts arguing for and against "productivity" during the pandemic and tbh I think that people need to do what they need to do in order to cope.
If that means living in your PJs and eating Funyuns watching Tiger King for the third time then go nuts if that's what's helping you get by.
If you cope with stress by working out and posting yr workout videos to Instagram Live so you can exercise with strangers go nuts, too.
We're all just doing what we can to keep it together right now.
Which brings me to the hard part.
The Hard Part.
the part where nobody wants to write these emails. where nobody wants to deliver this news.
where the weight of being responsible for someone else's livelihood goes from a pressure to a crushing avalanche and even though this is happening through no fault of our own
(they love us, are writing testimonials, have committed to coming back when markets bounce back and things aren't so unstable)
that doesn't make delivering the news any easier. There have been sad nights and stiff drinks and ugly-cries.
Luckily it hasn't been everybody, and strangely enough we're actually closing some new deals so it's not like we're going under, far from it, but things are changing and I miss a few weeks ago when everything felt calm and stable.
(How was that only a few weeks ago?)
In Leonard Cohen's book Beautiful Losers a woman kills herself by hiding in an elevator shaft so she'll be crushed by it and that's what this pandemic feels like
a dark, heavy mass bearing down on us. crushing us slowly.
Sometimes when I listen to the Prime Minister talk or when I hear the nonsense spewing out of Donald Trump's mouth I picture myself lying curled at the bottom of the elevator shaft. The weight of the pandemic pressing cold against my cheek.
The crushing weight of worry makes everything else seem trivial. It's been hard to write. Usually when I sit down to say something lately I've second-guessed myself and thought, who cares?
but earlier today I was talking to a friend about how important it is for us to share our stories during this time, and I realized that I'm acting like a hypocrite
because I haven't really talked about how I'm doing through this publicly, or really with anyone.
and maybe worst of all
I haven't asked you how you're doing.
