We’re entering the third month of our third extended (total) lockdown. I seem to be prefacing many paragraphs, captions and conversations with this line in the past week alone. And with this realisation comes shame. The shame of not being “strong enough”, “resilient enough”, “hustler enough”, “boss enough” or “tough enough”.

It’s one thing to tell someone to get hit 10 times and get back up on the 11th. And it’s another to do it. To be able to scrap the bottom of the barrel for hope while smiling with every pierce of a splinter.

When I think of the term “emotional fatigue” or “mental fatigue”, I can almost hear figures from a certain demographic cackling maliciously, “Ha! This? All you have to do is stay home! And you’re tired? Let me one-up your suffering by going into a self-righteous monologue.”

Instead of playing defence, to those people, I say, “Ok. You’re not in the arena. And it’s not for you.” (A response I derived from the words of Seth Godin and Brene Brown’s reference to Theodore Roosevelt.)

Since April 2020, when it became obvious that the lockdown would continue to be extended indefinitely under the guise of two-week increments, I’d like to think I came up with a least a dozen contingency plans, hopeful plans for the “next month”. Plans that were reduced from a five-year stretch to three years, then one year, six months, three months and, what I thought would be the shortest stretch, one month. It turns out planning even a week ahead was too much wishful thinking. Repeated snap lockdown announcements on Friday nights, with no warning, disrupted even the simplest of pipelines.

At this stage, I’m just going to take it meal to meal. Mentally surviving from one mealtime to the next. Getting past morning coffee with no disruptions nor malicious comments will be considered a win.