Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash
Disclaimer: I wrote this before shit really hit the fan and I thought I was just an overreacting hypochondriac with a flu, who got annoyed for skipping work and uni. First time she was right to freak out and I hate it.
Call the title of this post click-bait, but the hypochondriac in me felt that staying inside for three days for what might maybepotentiallybutprobablynot be Coronavirus makes this description genuine.
At first I thought that this short, drowsy holiday might be exactly what I needed anyway to get a general break from everyday life. Finally I have time to do all the things I tend to suddenly have the motivation for right before leaving the house for absolutely anything. Time to take up the piano again, I thought. Learn a new recipe. Sign up for a charity that plants trees. Maybe go for something completely pointless like painting my toenails in what feels like the third month of January. Time will feel infinite when I can't leave the house. Now’s the time to become anything I want to be!
The only problem is that I might have forgotten that being ill in your 20s isn’t the same as faking to be ill in my childhood.
Now that I have time to reflect on it, my mother’s unconditional belief in my brother and I whenever we tried to convince her we were too ill for school could either be a sign I inherited the hypochondriac gene from her, or that she’s got serious attachment issues to her kids.
Anyways, I soon realised that physically not being able to leave the house is actually quite debilitating. I had to cancel plans. Worry about whether I can go to work or have my coworkers hate me for letting them down on a weekend. Channel all my cooking skills by using whatever I had in the house, so all my meals eventually turned into everything-you-have-in-the-fridge-stir-fry. Or an omelette. There was also a lot of breakfast food for dinner but apparently that’s quirky now.
Because my body was aching and my lungs felt like they were about to give me internal bleeding whenever I coughed, I couldn’t really do much besides sleeping, and whatever anyone can do whilst in a lateral position for 24 hours. Hint: it’s not much.
My self-pity rationalised the idea to finish bingeing Love Is Blind because I was too “emotionally invested in the characters to stop now” and write a review, or rather rant, about it, that would amuse no one but myself. If I’m lucky, maybe the only other reader will be the person who will eventually break into my home for not paying my TV licence. After all, they always promise, but never do. You can’t rely on anything in this world.
The first day is never too bad. But then day two kicks in and you think:
Damn, I’ve got to do this all over again?
Imagine you’ve finished watching your Netflix shows, yet another YouTube spiral might just send you into an unwanted K-hole, and doing anything productive would be against the rules of staying at home sick. As the headache in my brain got louder, it seemed to start talking to the other parts that didn’t hurt as much yet. Delirious thoughts started trickling into my consciousness, like:
Perhaps this is a good time to paint?
Maybe I should learn how to become a comedian?
How many plants do I need to buy to finally live a fulfilled life?
I wonder what Paris Hilton is doing these days?
Could it be that it’s not all just my mother’s fault?
(This is the part where you imagine a record scratch.)
My brain wakes up from its cold-and-flu tablet-induced narcosis and I return to a state of semi-consciousness.
It’s 9pm and the only thing I’ve learned so far is that nothing good comes out of being alone for too long. I wonder how long this will last, deciding I will give it another day before trying to step into the scary unknown that lies outside my front door.
Oh! I know what I can do! Maybe the purpose of having all this time available at home is to finally get rid of the infinite amount of tabs on my laptop. But then I realised how leaving a tab open is just the digital equivalent of re-reading the same page of a book on the tube, so I gave up. How could someone who’s ill possibly have the energy for that?
After trying to use this opportunity to just go with the flow for once and forget about time, I let the sweet, sweet dopamine rush through my brain as I refreshed all my social media feeds every ten minutes. This must be the new way to meditate, I thought. I was finally able to switch off and forget how I would have no clue what to do next when this social media trance ends. Maybe I’d finally figure out that being ill for three days is a terrible substitute for a holiday, and that I might need a proper one when all this was over.
And just like that, I figured out that the one activity I could probably spend the rest of my quarantine on, was to do what everyone who’s ill seems to be doing during this crisis: look for flights. Got Corona? Trivago.
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