About twenty times during the last seven months, I’ve thought about writing this. This being an account of what quarantine has felt like. Something for me to read in a year, and hopefully revel in the weirdness of it all. That is, if we’re out of this in a year.

For the last seven months, my home has turned from a place where we rested, ate and slept to a workplace, a daycare, an office….and a home. It’s a full house. Four adults, one toddler. It’s been a lot. A lot of bodies, but also a lot of emotions under one roof.

It’s been eye-opening, heartbreaking, illuminating, wonderful and awful. It’s brought me closer to the people most important to my life, and also made me want to run far away about 200 different times.

I keep telling anyone who’ll listen that I’ve been feeling like I’m zoomed in on a picture, and I’m so close I have no idea what the picture is supposed to be. I want to zoom out and get that perspective, but I’m stuck.

The worst part of this (it’s really hard to pick one “worst part”) is that not only are we living through this traumatic event together, but we’re also trying to find meaning in a situation that has no solution. There’s no easy narrative or endpoint, but we’re all trying to write that story.

This story has no ending, and it’s hard to tell if we’re in the middle or the beginning. So the only thing to do is lean into the cliches, take it moment by moment and get comfortable with not having a plan.

I hope when I read this in a year, or ten, I have gained that perspective. I hope we’ve all made sense of what the hell this moment is, and we can appreciate the fact that we lived through it.