Oh shit, it's 5 o'clock already. Where did the day go?
In the days of quarantine, what even is time?
What even is time? At this point, I just want someone to wake me when 2020 is over. I spend Monday-Friday (still known as the work week) in my apartment-workspace-refuge-prison trying to find the most comfortable place to sit and do my job.
In the before times, I would have been able to tell you what day of the week it is if you asked me. Knowing what day it is doesn’t seem relevant anymore—each second bleeds into a minute, each minute into an hour, each hour into these 24-hour measurements of time, which, in quarantine, don’t amount to much. They don’t in my quarantine, anyway.
Like that line in T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” goes, “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.” My to-do lists, my planners, they’re all things I use to control and give meaning to my life. They help me measure productivity. This year—like all years since I was 22—started with a plan that has now spiraled into what feels like an aimless clusterfuck. I’m not able to follow my plan, and I feel lost.
(Seriously, though, who can I call about getting a do-over for 2020?)
This all sounds frivolous, of course, when you think about all the people who wouldn’t have the chance to redo 2020. As I write this, more than 180,000 Americans have died from COVID-19. Around the globe, that number has topped 830,000. In the midst of this pandemic, there are parallel timelines: One for people who are suffering and dying from COVID, and one for people who haven’t contracted the virus or are asymptomatic.
From these two broader timelines a lot of smaller, more-detailed ones start to emerge based on our individual situations. Are you a medical worker on the frontlines, being exposed to the virus and witnessing death on an unfathomable scale? I can’t even imagine what time must feel like for you right now. Are you an underpaid worker who has suddenly been deemed essential, so that you have no choice but to go to work every day and potentially be exposed to the virus? I wonder how this new normal we find ourselves in has impacted your perception of time.
Are you unemployed? Living below the poverty line? White? Black? Latino? Young? Old? A teacher? A parent? Are you still employed, allowed to work from home, and staying with your parents in the suburbs so that you don’t have to be alone in a tiny one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn? I fall into the latter category. I’ve been lucky, and luck seems to be all you can hope for when the world is burning.
Luck...also known as privilege. My privilege is something I’ve been reckoning with these past few months. I’m uncomfortable with it, but I know that’s the wrong attitude for a white woman to have, especially now. What good is having any kind of privilege if all you do is feel guilty about it or get defensive when someone points your privilege out to you? The productive thing to do is acknowledge your privilege and use it to do some good in the world, to raise up others who don’t have the same luck.
My privilege has, thus far, seen me through this pandemic unscathed. I still have a job, and I haven’t been asked to choose between my health and my income. I really only have myself to take care of—I don’t have to worry about whether or not my kids will go back to school, whether I can get an ailing relative the assistance they need. My life in quarantine has been passing with little to no incident. But I’m not OK.
Time is moving too fast to keep up with. One minute it’s morning—I get up, read, work out, take a shower (maybe), start my 10+ hour work day—the next minute it’s 5pm. Of course time is moving the way it always has, but I’m standing still. I’m staying in one place. The only thing that really varies throughout the day is which side of the couch I sit on. It’s easy to feel like time is slipping away when it seems to be moving forward without you.
Now that I have extra time that I’ve saved on commuting from place to place to work on my passion projects, I have nothing to show for it (except maybe these quarantine reviews). I haven’t read any more books than I normally would. I haven’t written a book. I haven’t completed any of the 9 different free Harvard and Yale courses I signed up for.
In the early days of quarantine, the concept of forced self-isolation was exciting. I didn’t think it would be depressingly lonely, that I would miss the outside world. I assumed I would find a way to make this the most productive period of my life. I know I’m not the only one—a lot of my friends had grand ambitions going into this pandemic that were abandoned a couple weeks in. Media outlets like the New York Times even published think pieces about the internet pressure to do more with the extra time you have now.
It’s telling that this pandemic has sparked a cultural comment on what we all should be doing or feeling. And with social platforms like Instagram and TikTok, you get to see how everyone is having more fun in quarantine than you.
How I spend my time in quarantine means nothing in the grander scheme of things. Time continues to move at its usual pace; this hasn’t changed even though my daily life has. I can keep trying to make sense of each day in my planner by giving everything I want to do a timestamp, by creating some structure. But what’s the point? I can’t control anything.
I give ‘Oh shit, it’s 5 o’clock already. Where did the day go?’ 2 stars.