Could a depressed person make THIS (list)?

I’m going to level with you, beloved subscribers — I’m in a terrible mood today. Last night we had neighbors over for dinner on the roof of our building, which was so wonderful and felt so relatively-normal, but I had one too many glasses of wine (so, two) and woke up feeling like garbage. Small mercies: Raffi didn’t wake up having a temper tantrum about nothing and instead very sweetly cuddled with me, then asked nicely if I would turn on Story Pirates if he brought me the radio. He then complained about having to go to school and when pressed about why, said that [Classmate] sometimes “ignores” him. It’s hard to imagine anyone ignoring Raffi for very long because he makes it physically impossible, so props to this kid. Anyway, Raffi went to school. It’s his second Monday of in-person school so far this year. We pray that it lasts and have made peace with having absolutely no control over whether it does.

My to-do list this week includes writing two recommendation letters for former students, mailing Chanukah presents to my family, going over to Ruth’s apartment to see whether or not I’ve managed to keep her plants alive another week, opening the Word document that contains my novel, and doing a double Care and Feeding column so that I don’t have to do any more for the rest of the year. I will be honest with you here in this semi-private setting that while I’ve liked having the stability of a regular deadline, reading through the questions in the CAF inbox is not fun at all. America’s failed COVID response has put so much strain on caregivers, who were already pushed to the their limits anyway by America’s near-total lack of acknowledgment that care work is work. Adding the **holiday season** to the mix has seemed to really bring out the worst in people! Also, people use the CAF inbox to praise the other columnists and criticize me, which is mostly funny (“our language is not inherently misogynistic! Grow up!” someone recently submitted) but also feels more like Reading The Comments than anything I’ve done in a while — I keep my Twitter notifications set to “echo chamber” — and uh, I dislike it. There’s an aspect of this gig that takes me back to the late 00s, when I spent too much time alone and too online, engaging with people who definitely, in Morrissey’s words, didn’t care if I lived or di-hiiiiiiied.

There are other aspects of my current life that remind me of that time, too — I live this isolated single person existence during my workdays alone in an empty apartment, eating string cheese and making infinity cups of tea, trying to convince myself to do yoga but only succeeding in changing into yoga pants. The (huge) difference is that instead of that being my ENTIRE life, it’s my life for 4-5 hours at a time, after which I re-enter my real life. My real life sometimes looks like the montage scene in a movie that shows the characters as they were before the bad thing happened, ie wrestling in bed with our adorable children in their matching pajamas. It also sometimes looks like me trying to reason with a 2 year old as he cries so hard he almost vomits because his brother won’t let him play with the playdoh they both got identical sets of, and meanwhile said brother steals my phone and locks himself in the bathroom to illicitly watch videos of grown adults feigning enthusiasm about unboxing toys on YouTube. All of which sounds, I realize, not that bad, except there is just so much of it, and it’s endless, and there’s no relief from it in the form of, like, a childfree personal or professional social situation that involves other people in an indoor setting. Ever.

So here are my current virtual escapes: