I went to a bar last night. Haven’t done that for a while. Everyone there seemed alive, more animated than I remember characteristic of the general public. Seventy-four degrees on a Friday evening aglow with string lights and $10 cocktails brings out the best in ‘em.

So many faces, unmasked. Strangers. In new clothes. I’ve written before about fashion and trends, which have since entered the warm-weather iteration 2.0. Tops are croppier and pants more billowed, all paper-bag waists and oversized tie fronts. Teva sandals rival only Birkenstocks, and the whole thing is eerily similar to Delia’s (dELiA*s !!!) of early ’90s glory. Ain’t that the way, though—the apparel equivalent of pop-sampling songs.

Skinny jeans are out with a capital O. I remember when they swept In on the red heels of Louboutins circa 2011. “I’m never wearing those pants,” I swore. “Sooooo unflattering.”

A decade later I have so many pairs, now neatly folded in the back of my closet waiting for Goodwill. Printed pairs, stretchy pairs, stiff pairs, too-small pairs. Change is good, though it requires effort.

Onward we trod, right? Updating our homes in mid-century modern, scouring internet shelves for the latest plant-based brands. Ahead we charge with the waves of change, perhaps failing to understand why.

Near the beginning of lockdown, I bought a Fitbit. I was curious about the usual things that people who buy Fitbits are: How many steps am I getting? Anywhere close to 10,000? Is my heart rate 8 zillion beats per minute, how it feels?

Turns out I didn’t realize how often I was holding my breath. Inadvertently and just because, for a second or two. Shallow. Stuttered. Belabored. Stunned.

Sometimes people ask why I so fervently insist on exercise. My reasons have evolved since 2001, when I first set foot in a gym for all the wrong reasons. Whatever the case, in March 2020, exercise regulated my breathing. Its purpose.

Also turns out we have nary a chance fighting algorithms designed to perpetuate anger and fear. Turns out lies travel years ahead of truth. And it turns out sudden Christmas lights on November 1 in pursuit of

J O Y

are totally a thing in my neighborhood.

Because achieving joy feels hard. Lights from Lowe’s won’t really do it. Not when we’ve been governed by hate and vitriol for four years + never letting go.

But we can do hard things. It might not feel like it now. But we can. You can. I can. We have to.

In May and June and again in July, I tried to plant a garden. It felt right, those months, to turn over topsoil with bare hands and make something out of nothing.

Or try. Aphids and slugs came to battle against an angry sun that baked wet dirt into clay in no time at all. Then the squirrels got my strawberries and it was like nothing wanted to thrive on my watch, including me.

Since the first seed packets, I’d worried nothing would grow. And for a while, nothing did.

I planted and replanted and attended and let it sit. And sit, and now everything is everywhere. Curious leaves of spinach. Confused yet proud basil. Happy little carrots. Bemused jalapeños.

Gardening has shown me how much I don’t know. But it’s also revealed that I’m OK with uncertainty, despite daily anxiety that shouts at me otherwise.

I’ve learned that I don’t need to know everything to simply move ahead. That a place of order can look great on paper—and it often does. You can water and harvest and hope for the best, and sometimes it works. Except when it doesn’t.

And even then, life goes on, seeds scattered all over. They’ll take where it’s right.

I grew up in a house in southeast Denver from the time I was 3 until I left for college. A pale green, single-family home on the corner of Nassau Avenue and Rosemary Way. The neighborhood was full of families, bicycles and trees. Tall, full trees.

A black family of five lived across the street. Two parents, three teenagers. My dad was friends with the dad, Robert, whose oldest son drove a dark purple Camaro that I always thought looked fast and cool. My dad and Robert often chatted over neighborly things like mowing lawns, checking the mail and arriving home from work. We’d have dinner together every now and then. I remember their dog running around out back. I remember the daughter painting my nails.

One afternoon—it must’ve been a weekend because my dad was home, working in the yard—he abruptly crossed the street to go into Robert’s house. I didn’t know why. When my dad came back, he walked up our driveway wiping tears from his eyes. A rare sight.

He gently told me that Robert’s son, the one with the cool car, had been killed during a weekend in Las Vegas. All he said.

After that, the purple Camaro sat in Robert’s driveway, covered and untouched.

“We’ll invite all my friends,” my son says, referencing his birthday party. This summer. “I want chocolate cupcakes with vanilla icing.”

I silently do the math. “Yeah,” I reply, after a minute. “Maybe.”

These days, my days aren’t unlike anyone else’s. I imagine we all share something of a collective experience. A bizarre mix of the comfort of home, the anxiety lurking beyond our doors, and the inert lethargy that comes with being stuck somewhere between the two.

It appears the phrase “coronavirus good news” is a common search term on Google. But so are all the uncomfortable words, of course.

Every day I wake up and take stock, you know? Do I feel OK? Does anything feel off—sore throat, am I achy, do I feel rested as usual? I check the boxes, shower and make coffee. I’m one of the lucky ones, so far.

I’m aware of it. Daily. Sometimes by the minute. Weird, though, even so—the internal things that pandemics stir to the surface. Not that any of us would know, having never lived through one until now.

For example: Food. Eating. A schedule. Should there be one? Before this, I’d become quite dependent on routine. “X is when I do Y.” Question asked, question answered. Having experienced a years-long eating disorder over a decade ago, the sudden shift to an unending stretch of time has been shitty. When do I do what? If I’m hungry, should I eat? Tired, should I sleep? Some days, even the simplest things feel hard.

Then there’s exercise, my sanity-saver as it’s ever been. Days before the shelter-in-place took effect, I got on Craigslist and found a wholesale warehouse an hour away, selling everything from washing machines to washed-up treadmills. There I was that Saturday afternoon, in New Lenox, Illinois, loading a black-and-yellow spin bike into my car. Larry the Lemond and I spend 45 minutes together daily, every day since quarantine.

These are the silly things. I’m lucky.

It’s a difficult thing, what we’re going through. Made a trillion times harder if you or someone you know is sick. But no matter how you dice it, things aren’t easy right now.

For those who stay lucky, things will get better. Normal life won’t be the same, probably for a long time. But we’ll go to the store. We’ll say hi to strangers three feet away. And we’ll buy eggs and sugar to make chocolate cupcakes with vanilla icing in the beautiful heat of summer.

There are several little things I wish I were good at, but I’m not. At some point, I need to just decide that I’m fine with not being good at them. They include:

• wrapping gifts
• using chopsticks
• uncorking wine
• finding the edge of transparent packing tape after it slips off the dispenser’s teeth

These are little things. My quality of life does not diminish because I’m not good at them, spare a few passing moments of mild shame (“You don’t know how to use chopsticks?!”).

But what about the big things I’m not good at. Period, not question mark. Like telling my family that I love them. Or refraining from an immediate and intense meltdown over something quite ephemeral. (Some things never change.)

I post happy moments on Instagram because I am happy. It almost feels like summer, even now, the sludge of early March in Chicago-ish-land. I make fancy cocktails at home with bourbon and ice. I toast overpriced champagne in the winter sun of sidewalk cafés.

But then sometimes I’ll be driving and I’ll hear a song. You know? You know how that goes? And I’ll cry. Not a big ugly sob, but come on, some tears. Tight and kinetic in my chest. Then I’ll wonder how I might appear to people in cars next to me. Are they watching? Is it a female-specific trait to wonder how you look when you cry, all red-nosed and puffy-eyed. Period, not question mark.

That thought feels vaguely un-feminist. I push it away. Picking apart the crying usually stops the crying, so then I’m just a girl in a car. Feeling self-conscious. Again.

Every so often—maybe once a month?—I have a recurring dream. There are three variations:

1. A large body of water, usually an ocean, overwhelms me. I don’t die, but it feels panicked and scary, like drowning is imminent.
2. My wallet is stolen.
3. I lose control of my car while driving.

It’s fairly obvious that each of these represents a loss of control, one way or another. Let’s see what a dime-store psychology online dream dictionary has to say about each, shall we?

Water. To see water in your dream symbolizes your subconscious and your emotional state of mind. To dream that a wall of water is coming towards you implies that your emotions are welling up.

Wallet. To see your wallet in your dream symbolizes your self-identity or financial security. To dream that you lose your wallet suggests that  you need to be more cautious and careful about your spending and finances. It is time to be more responsible with your money. 

Car. To dream that you are driving a car denotes your ambition, your drive and your ability to navigate from one stage of your life to another. To dream that your car flipped over or rolled over implies that some significant event is preventing you from achieving your goals. 

In conclusion, it appears I’m an overly emotive, financially challenged goal-setter who isn’t achieving much. How ’bout that?!

I listened to a podcast a few weeks ago about exercising a competitive mindset in all aspects of life. The premise was, if you’re wise, the drive to compete will inform every single thing you do. And that it should be intense. Because if you don’t work hard enough to simply keep what you already have, someone else will come in, work harder, and take it. Your job, your girlfriend, your boyfriend, your spouse, your car, your health, your fitness, your money, your vibe. Somebody out there wants every piece of your life, and they will compete with you to get it.

I don’t know. While I appreciate the push to work hard, a scarcity-focused mindset feels off to me. Selfish? Self-absorbed? Self-centered? Every man for himself, with little attention paid to helping others develop and succeed.

Putting that aside, though, I’m into the notion of actively choosing your life every. Single. Morning. My job, for instance. Working a corporate 9 to 5 can present a dangerously easy path toward complacency. To sneak in 10 minutes late in the morning. To push off a task until tomorrow.

But what if I told myself a story: “There’s this girl named Brenda. She wants your job. She’ll show up 5 minutes early. She’ll complete every assignment before deadline, and she’ll nail it.” Huh. Ok. What’s up, Brenda. I see you. And you aren’t stealing my job. I’m gonna make sure of it.

And you know, maybe there’s a balance. A place where competitive, self-focused energy meets a mindset of abundance—one that knows there’s enough out there for everyone to grow.

I’m all for everyone feeling validated and everything, but a wee bit of healthy competition motivates humans to work harder. I consider this especially true for kids around my son’s age, 10.

If you’re a child, and the first-place winner of any given competition—spelling bees to soccer games—receives the same prize as the kid who came in last, where are you supposed to find motivation?

You might say motivation is supposed to come from within, not an external source. But to me, that’s adult speak, really.

Rewards are earned. In the real world of day jobs and cube mates, you’re typically not applauded for subpar work. Perform that way long enough, and you might end up out. Imagine an office full of people conditioned to believe that just showing up was a hard day’s work. (Actually, I assume you can imagine that pretty easily.)

An environment like that isn’t conducive to achieving great things. Average things, sure. But we want more for our kids than average, more than simple participation.

The holiday season is fun, blah blah blah. But like many events in life, I’m equally as glad to bid it goodbye as I was to welcome it in.

Taking down all the Christmas stuff this past weekend re-introduced visual simplicity, an eager relief from the aesthetic weight of all the decorations. Removing the wreath from my front door let in a flood of fresh light. Hauling the Christmas tree out of my living room re-established a breath of open space. Light and square footage that exists the other 11 months of the year, but I always grow accustomed to those dark, bushy pine needles holding their own.

It’s a practical thing, too, feeling the gravity of the season lift. I’d assumed that waking up this morning, the first Monday of the new year, would be a discouraging thing. It wasn’t. I’m grateful to return to the grind, as they say, because the grind is what gets you from here to there. Life was starting to feel like one long, lazy weekend. No structure, nowhere to be, time rendered irrelevant.

I like waking up with a plan.