Suzanne Harrington: I'll keep unloading the dishwasher until I feel normal again
Someone creative was being interviewed on the radio the other day, and asked about what they’d achieved so far during lockdown, how productive they’d been. The response — hollow laughter — echoed out of the radio around the kitchen as I loaded/unloaded the dishwasher for the 18th time that day. The interviewee, once they’d stopped laughing, said all they had achieved was staring out the window. It made me want to phone in, to shriek over the airwaves, “Me too, me too!”
I’m struggling to write this, to be honest. And I LOVE writing. Yet, there is a novel in my hard drive, returned to me for a rewrite, which remains untouched. Two, actually. There is a drink memoir sloshing around inside my head rather than being tapped into my laptop, because I have not been able to focus on anything beyond an opening paragraph. Why?
It's not like I am home educating small children, or even medium-sized ones. I am not a key worker, rushed off my feet keeping everyone else on theirs. I’m definitely not too busy to write, or too ill, or too anything. I’ve never had writer’s block in my life and am not sure I even believe in it. Yet almost a year into this – this — other dimension — despite all the time in the world, there has been zero creative productivity, zero creative achievement. I load/unload the dishwasher.
And yes, I know I am lucky to have a dishwasher, lucky to have a roof over my head, lucky that my kids are dealing with lockdown as young adults rather than five-year-olds bouncing off the walls. I know, I know. However, shouting to count your blessings at someone with a broken toe while so many others have broken both legs does not make a broken toe less uncomfortable; it does not diminish it.
We don’t, unless we are actively unkind, seek to diminish the happiness of others — if your neighbour won a tenner, you wouldn’t dismiss their small elation because someone else had won a million. Of course, you wouldn’t. Yet we constantly do it with distress, our own, and that of others. A friend tells me how since someone’s son died recently, she feels that all future permission to feel like crap has been removed from her, because it will never equal the pain felt by the person who lost their son. Which makes distress into a maths equation that we can never fully solve.
Count your blessings counts for jack. What this past year has shown above all is that it’s alright to feel like crap, to feel aimless, distracted, numb, disconnected, restless, non-productive, low achieving. Getting dressed and going for a walk counts as an achievement this winter. Anything else is a bonus. My great pandemic achievements have been intermittent sea swimming, making body scrub from coffee grounds, and vegan tiramisu. That’s it. In between, I load/unload the dishwasher, and wait to feel normal again.
