Last week I stayed home sick with what a video doctor decided was probably the flu. My symptoms matched up with either that or Covid-19 but Milwaukee didn’t have any tests for non emergency cases, so they told me to stay home and act like I was quarantined. I sent off my doctors note to my bosses and began the WFH ritual as told. As I did, my first instinct was to work as much as I could to function as both a distraction and to maintain an air of normalcy in the hope of reducing my panic levels (it didn’t work).

By the end of last week, our bosses finally told everyone non-essential to WFH for the foreseeable future. This was after initially distributing disinfectant among the office and asking us to eat lunch at our desk or in our car, to maintain social distancing; both wonderful ideas (eyeroll). So, this was the first week of everyone being remote, and… it hasn’t been without hiccups. Missed meetings, failed technology, lack of communication, all the big ones you expect from a 100+ year old manufacturing company. Hopefully things will get better, but I’m not getting my hopes up.

This collided with the first week of teaching online at MIAD, after they sent students home for the semester (which is good timing because Wisconsin issued a statewide shelter-at-home order during that spring break extension), and that’s taken some extra time and effort to adjust schedules, projects, and plans from here until May. Also, online classes just take longer (at least for the prof)! If you want to meet individually with each student to check on their progress you have to choose between a video call or a written message, and the first has some barriers but is by far the best option. But that means scheduling and timing out a dozen calls after the lecture, and each of them has a delay in people seeing the message and joining, sharing their screens, and so on; so my 2hr class has become a 3hr webinar. After a long day “at work,” an extra long class is just a lot to deal with.

I thought I was handling it pretty well during the first part of the week, but by Friday morning I started dissociating pretty hard and found my panic climbing a staircase I see no end to. I need to spend this weekend in rest and recovery mode, but still need to grade, plan next weeks classes, and catch up on my hobbies that have been neglected for almost a month now.

Staying home while sick felt normal; I’d do that anyway, and with everyone else still in the office, things felt pretty normal. But this week, I would have gone into the office… my fever is gone, the cough is suppressed, and I’m not winded by walking to the kitchen… instead, I haven’t left home for a second week straight, and it’s kinda getting to me.

That may come as a surprise to anyone who knows me, since I usually avoid leaving the house under normal circumstances; but knowing I can’t leave, even when I want to, puts a different twist on things. There are times where I’d normally leave to grab lunch or pick something up at the store to walk a bit and stretch my legs, but that’s rerouted into a delivery or denied completely. And I miss going to work because it’s much easier to transition to “work mode” when there’s a commute and separate workspace involved; working from home makes it so easy to let that shit follow you into your freetime and I don’t want work bleeding into the rest of my life.

It’s also made me come to terms with the fact I’m not a shut-in or recluse, just a grumpy old man with more hobbies than time. Pairing that kind of realization with a global pandemic isn’t the best timing.

But I’m sure we’re all going through similar things right now. And staying home is not just responsible, it’s the best course of action to protect yourself and those around you. We will struggle for a while to find a new normal while cooped up in our homes, but I’m extremely lucky my job(s) can be done from a distance.

I don’t know how to end this post, but I’d like to say thank you for reading this rambling personal post. You aren’t alone in this, and sharing our stories is important during a time of national trauma. You aren’t crazy for feeling however you feel. Don’t bottle it up, let it out, however you think is healthy.

As I’ve seen other saying, “stay safe and stay sane.”