I've been growing more in love with my room every day. The clutter here and there, the yellow light oozing from my first adult apartment purchase four years ago, books and books and books strewn anywhere and everywhere, my framed Marquéz portrait from a dear friend and the pups.
Isolation can often feel claustrophobic, suffocating. But it can feel like an embrace, too, if my mind is in the right place, if I do enough for myself in a day to feel human—brush my teeth, make a meal, shower, read a book, write.
Writing has been such a chore lately, for two reasons. First, that spine/tailbone injury from months ago seems to be getting worse without physical therapy, which I am desperate for anytime I sit or stand and the pain shoots from my tailbone through my buttocks and down my thighs. I miss being still, and the memory of a body without pain is slipping.
Second, the anxiety of All This Shit™ is getting to me the way it’s getting to almost everyone I know. I’m filled with anger and don’t know what to do with it; I’m overwhelmed with sadness and don’t know how to move forward. I try to pick up a pen and the pen slips between my fingers and hits the floor and I’m in too much pain to bend, so I break instead.
I joined a creativity challenge to help me out of the rut and open my mind—The Isolation Journals. Today’s prompt pushed me to see my space anew, to revel in the weird and familiar and beautiful, even on the most painful days.
Prompt: Write a travel journal entry from your home, could be your living room, could be your bed. Write as though you've just arrived in a new place (because, in many ways, you have) and what you're observing about the place and how you feel in it. Write what you see, hear, and touch, as though it's all brand new. What are you learning about yourself in this different land, with all its deprivations? If you'd like to turn this into a visual entry, draw a map complete with notes about this foreign land's customs, rituals, and routines.
I chose to visualize my bedroom, but did so from the backyard. I wanted to test my memory and see what my brain would include or exclude and why.
The first thing I drew was the bed—a bed far too large for one human. But factor in the two furry pals who take up 90% of the space and I suppose it’s understandable. I realize, as I draw my bed, that I associate beds not with comfort or romance or nighttime sobs but with dogs. Even on vacation, when I think of sleeping in a new hotel or b&b, I think of my dogs. I haven’t yet lost a dog. I don’t believe I’ll take it well.
My room is essentially a mini library made tame only because I’ve let visiting friends take one or two home to borrow or keep. I’m drawn to books anytime I travel, especially if I’m staying at a host’s home and have a chance to browse a stranger’s collection. I can fall in love with someone based on their list of favorites or the books they recommend to me in passing.
Something else I notice as I complete today’s prompt: the laptop and phone are far from where my head would rest. This isn’t always the case in reality, but I seem to be subconsciously drawing a dream of a tech-free respite.
I also take some pride in the mess I’ve made—the clothes outside the full hamper, the store-bought smoothie on the side table, the fallen ice pack now melting on the floor beside the bed. I don’t shy away from the ugly, and have no interest in perfection. In typing that last sentence, I wonder if I’m writing to convince you or myself.
Today was not a bad day. It was a rather good one, spent under the sun with fresh mango, bird chirps and bee buzzes and my dogs frolicking around me. I’m not sure what my visual would represent if this prompt were assigned on another day, a cloudy or rainy one that kept me in bed from sunup to sundown. But I have no urge to think on the what-if right now. In this moment, I am grateful for the small joys and reflections today’s little exercise has gifted.
—fiza