I spent a lot of Sundays during the pandemic having staring contests with the ceiling. I never won. The ceiling always won, especially the staring contests that happened right after lunch on Sundays. Sometimes this would result in naps. Oftentimes, it wouldn't.
What is a person who doesn't have other people?
Before the pandemic, I was convinced that I was an introvert. I really believed that. In any group of friends, I was rarely the person who led conversations and never the one who could drop hysterical bon mots in at the drop of a hat (my staircase wit always end up coming in through the loading dock). I didn't realize that I had the habit of surrounding myself with extra-extroverted people I could hide behind, until a serious depressive episode in the fall of 2019, and the pandemic immediately after, deprived me of my camouflage and my structure.
By the sixth month of the pandemic, I was falling apart. I'd found out that my application to regain my Spanish residency had been turned down for administrative reasons. I also started to realize that I was so far off anyone's social radar that I might as well not have existed. Unlike a lot of people, I got lucky: I found a really good therapist who pushed back and has helped me immensely. I fell in love hard (albeit with someone who doesn't know I exist), and the mega-crush helped spark joy in other areas of my life, too, especially with music. Yet there was that nagging social and physical hunger that came with realizing I didn't have much of an existence outside of my head and my apartment.
Is there anybody out there?
So I leaned in extra-hard on reaching out to others. I set up Zoom coffee dates with anyone who showed the slightest interest in having one. I scheduled twice-monthly phone dates with a cousin in Toronto. I'd forward on any vaguely relevant meme or joke I was sent on Whatsapp. And thanks to the work I was doing with my therapist, I got a lot better at just saying "I need help. I am sinking on my own."
It helped.
Somewhat.
What does it mean to be human if there aren't other humans to be human around?
Two years later, as we head into the fourth year of living with COVID, I'm a LOT more protective of myself as a social animal. Though I realize that a lot of people were going through a lot of shit during COVID, I also realize that the pandemic was a very effective litmus test that revealed where people's priorities were, and that I wasn't a priority for a lot of people who I would have been happy to support. It's been one hell of a wakeup call.
When I released After Times last month, I knew that it wouldn't take off the same way that Five Drinks In had. Social isolation is not an easy topic. A couple of people have gotten really defensive about the song, but I'm not standing down from the stance I took when I was writing it. For decades, if not centuries, women have been expected to curb or tone down what they've gone through so that other people feel comfortable. And I'm at an age where I refuse to do that. Does that mean that the song got less promotion or got added to fewer playlists? Probably. Am I all that worried about it? Not particularly. I'm happy to talk about the song. But the pandemic pulled the genie out of the bottle, and the genie quite enjoys not being confined anymore.
Plus, I figure an EP is like a pizza: If all you have are four elements that hit the same two emotional notes, that's not very enjoyable, is it? It's like having melted cheese on top of baked dough - it'd get pretty boring after two or three bites. You need the tang of the tomato sauce, the saltiness of sausage or anchovies, the sweetness of tomato slices. Just having the same thing over and over and over again, whether it's cheese or love songs or the same shows on television all the time gets really boring really quickly.
Or like staring at the ceiling and never looking at anything else, really.