The fourth Friday in quarantine wasn’t my best day. It was, of course, Good Friday, which having been brought up Catholic, I’ve always found to be a perplexing mark on the calendar.
Right off the top, there really isn’t anything “good” about it. It was the day the good guy fell and all hope seemed lost. In traditional three-act story structure, the hero experiences a low point at the point between acts 2 and 3. Pretty safe to say that the New Testament has that moment here.
We used to go to Good Friday service when I was a kid, and it was like a dirge. It is this very dark and grim occasion, which as a grown up I can understand was a reflection of the deep complexity of the human experience and stands juxtaposed with the bright, celebratory Easter service. I get that now. When I was 9, I just thought it was a stone cold bummer and a speed bump on the way to getting some candy baskets.
Good Friday is a day of reflection, when we are meant to stare into the abyss of tragedy and hopelessness, and confront our own fragility and humanity. On Good Friday, even Jesus took a moment to shout angst to the heavens and tell his father, “hey, this sucks.”
While I’m not especially religious, it occurred to me after the fact that I had a little bit of a quarantine low point myself on not-so-good-Friday. My original intention was to go out for a few supplies and get on with my day, but as the list grew, I decided to do a more substantial run to minimize upcoming store visits.
As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I find going to stores now to be surreal and somewhat stressful. Part of is the physical weirdness of wearing the mask, part of it is that I feel Ike I’m stressing myself trying to make sure I remember everything we need, and part of it is that it just crystallizes the moment we are in.
I put on the mask, made my stops and did my thing. I brought everything home and we spent the time to do the proper disinfecting of everything. And when it was over, I felt drained and exhausted to the core. And I had my moment of confronting my own humanity.
When this whole thing started and we had no idea what lockdown was going to look like, I went bananas stocking up on everything I could think of (including bananas) because I didn’t know when or if I’d be able to get to things again. As things have leveled out, I know now that while I want to limit my store visits to once a week or less, the fact is we can get pretty much anything we need.
Still, every time I’ve gone to the store the past week or two, I’ve wound up continuing this trend of getting a few weeks worth of stuff. The result is that our pantry is bursting and freezers are full. Instead of working through the stockpile we have, I just keep adding to it.
No, I haven’t reached the point of pushing down old ladies for the last can of black beans or marble rye. I am not an official hoarder, but this reality has made me hoard-adjacent. Hoardak, if you will.
I am going way overboard not he survivalist stuff. And I’ll be completely honest, I’m embarrassed about that. I haven’t been approaching this aspect of things with a clear head.
My parents were stocker uppers. When I as little, I spent a decent amount of time worrying that nuclear war or another disaster was around the corner, and my folks did have a very healthy stockpile of canned food and water, just in case. What I found in this moment now is that my little kid disaster reflex has been sneaking out and I hadn’t even noticed.
The state of the world right now is affecting all of us in different ways. What I realized on Friday is that one of the ways my own worries and stress were manifesting themselves was through this urge to overstock on things. It comes from a good place…I want to make sure my family is safe and secure, like all of us do. But I realized this was veering toward unhealthy. Trolls is a popular movie in our house, and I don’t want to turn into Branch.
If anyone has made it to this point and is still reading, I’d be curious to hear how you’re finding your own anxiety and stress manifest themselves. These are weird times and I imagine many of us are reacting in sometimes unexpected ways.
So now that I have identified it, the next step is to work on it. Part of it for me is having some faith that things will ultimately be OK and to stop thinking that every strip to the store will be my last. That faith in a better tomorrow is something I can struggle with, too. But that is something I’m working on and I firmly believe in the power of putting positive energy out in the universe.
The other step is to start eating up all this frozen spinach.
So that was my Friday, in a nutshell. As I went through the twists and turns of my personal journey, Erin started preparing our garden for planting soon, the kids picked up the landscaping rocks they’ve been throwing around the yard for the past few months, and we all played some games. Asta played along too, but not in the traditional, following the directions way. She sat in the box.
It wasn’t the brightest of days, sure, but at least there was cute puppy photo. A good Friday indeed.
