The Bubble

Lately, I feel like I live in a bubble. My bubble is about 250 square feet, give or take, and it’s the space I spend the majority of my time in. My bubble is my apartment but it’s also not my apartment. It surrounds me still, in its way, when I brave the piling snow and bone-shaking winds to go for a walk.

My bubble’s fairly new, still. Back when all of this started, my bubble didn’t exist. Living with a roommate and caught up in this strange, often alarming, new way of life, we worked hard to live in the novelty of it. In the year and a half we’d lived together, we were rarely at home at the same time during a working week with our conflicting schedules and we packed ourselves into a summer camp mentality of activities and routines. We also checked the news often, relentlessly, most mornings starting with a discussion of what we’d seen so far.

Lockdown pt1 activities included: turning into our living room into a yoga studio.

We got through it surprisingly well, but we were incredibly present in the day-to-day minutiae of the unfolding chaos outside of our peaceful sanctuary. It was a persistent thought at the back of my mind throughout the day and few – if any – phone calls to friends and family stranded in their own pockets of the world would pass without discussion of it.

As for many people, this time around has been rather different. I pay a minimal amount of attention to the news because I haven’t the headspace for much more than that. I also live by myself now, so my routine is entirely my own. I made myself a bubble in which I could live comfortably, I could work, I could rest. 

When days at a time stretched by without talking to other people, it became incredibly easy to forget about anything outside of my bubble. Not so much in terms of the immediate  realities of the pandemic but in the consequences of it all.

My days are busy, somehow. I work a full day between writing and editing, in part for personal projects and in part for my small collection of freelance clients. It is not enough to live on – it will not be enough to live on in the looming deadline of the benefit system running its course. Perhaps out of perseverance, I’d shut off that pocket of information for the time being. If I stopped to think too long about the fact that this little lifestyle I’d created for myself was not sustainable, I wouldn’t get out of bed in the mornings. 

So, I didn’t. I just continued on with my bubble life, ending a day with a feeling of accomplishment at what I’d achieved, and ignoring that the grand earnings for the day were probably just shy of a loaf of bread. 

But my bubble is starting to fracture a bit. I noticed it one day as I spoke to my parents on the phone. They were quizzing me on what was happening about a potential new job I was due to be starting (on hold for bizarre anomalies in my immune system) and how I was going to manage once the benefits ran out (absolutely no idea). The realities started making themselves known again, settling inside my quiet space and reminding me that that the book I’m working on might have to take lower priority over the immensely tedious writing job that I agreed to because it paid.

Sometimes I really wish I was in a job where people paid me to do the thing I like to do.

The problem for me is that such narratives aren’t productive. They kick-start the panic mode in my brain and send my anxiety into overdrive. Suddenly, it’s not just the book which seems impossible to work on, but anything. In the bubble, every day might not be perfect, but life continued at a pleasant enough neutral state that I could function. I can’t function in panic. There’s too much background noise.

Yesterday, I sat with my mum on the phone for over an hour, talking about everything and nothing. Neither of us really had any news; nothing had changed in the three days since we had last spoken. But still, we nattered on. For the first time in a long time, I don’t even think we once mentioned the pandemic, or lockdowns, or vaccinations. I nestled into the space of my bubble and tuned out again for a bit. 

My bubble is the only space in which I can not have a plan and feel all right about it. I like plans. I thrive on plans. I don’t feel like I’ve had a plan in a long time and that’s terrifying. In my bubble, I don’t really need a plan because – for better or worse – every day is essentially the same. 

I’m trying to force myself to have a plan again. My plans span about two weeks at a time. One week is too short – things inevitably derail somewhere in the week and then I panic as the plan tumbles from the track into a snowdrift, power grinding to a halt. A month is too long because things can change so suddenly out there. So, two weeks. I set a plan for the next two weeks. What is happening in those two weeks that I need to be aware of (if anything)? What would I like to have done in those two weeks? What should I remember for the next two weeks?

The last two week plan ended neatly at the weekend with everything crossed off the to-do list and a feeling of relief at having made it. It’s Thursday and the next two week plan hasn’t even been properly set yet because this week derailed so wildly – so the two week plan will start next week. 

The plan is this: keep doing what I’m doing. That might seem counterintuitive to planning at all, but that’s the plan. At the end of this two weeks, I should be more or less about to start the new job – its as yet undetermined working days and number of hours will inform that next and the next. 

I can’t live in my bubble forever. But I also need parts of it to keep me going through all of this, that I can’t get from the world outside of it. My bubble needs a door, or at least a window, to bridge the two together. Maybe, with that bit of little fresh air, the panic can be kept at bay.