Louise O'Neill: We will all find unique ways to survive

If there was ever a good moment to lower our expectations and give ourselves a break, this would be it, writes Louise O’Neill

When I was first recovering from my eating disorder, a nutritionist devised a structured eating plan for me. This plan consisted of three meals a day and two snacks, and it was a way of re-feeding and healing my malnourished body. After almost a year of following this plan, we worked together as I shifted into intuitive eating. With intuitive eating, you reject diet culture, there are no ‘good’ or ‘bad’ foods; you eat when you are hungry and you stop when you are full.

It sounds easy but as many of us know, when it comes to our bodies, things are rarely simple. We often use food for comfort rather than fuel, as a means to distract rather than to nourish ourselves. Lately, I’ve realised that my instinct to eat intuitively has been slipping. I have begun to rely on the clock rather than my stomach to tell me when I should eat. It’s 11am, let’s have a mid-morning snack! It’s 1pm, what will I have for lunch? 7.30pm, I’d better get dinner on the table.

I’m not necessarily hungry at these times but the process of the meals — the planning and the preparation, the cooking then sitting down to eat – it gives me a sense of purpose. It punctuates the day, giving it a structure I’m increasingly desperate for. It feels like time has become almost meaningless, hours stretching on and on into oblivion.

How did one month feel as if it contained decades? When will this all end?

I know some people reading this will be busier than ever. They have children to home- school and conference calls on Zoom to take. There will be readers who are still going to their jobs in grocery stores and pharmacies, GP surgeries and hospitals, putting their lives at risk to ensure ours continue to run relatively smoothly. But I know there will be others who are like me, those who are suddenly faced with all these hours to fill, and who somehow still find themselves going to bed at night and wondering what exactly they did that day. Isaac Newton discovered gravity — or was it calculus? — while quarantined, we berate ourselves, and didn’t Shakespeare write King Lear when he was in quarantine because of the plague?

And I can’t even manage to finish reading a book, let alone writing one, because my concentration is so fractured. I sit, shoulders hunched, as I horror-scroll through social media until darkness falls around the house like rain. There are only two things managing to hold my attention — baking and exercising. I made banana, pecan, and chocolate chip bread today, I did an online gym class before going out for my government regulated 2k walk, and now I’m writing this column. That’s probably all I’m going to accomplish today and I’m trying to be okay with that.

Of course, there will be people who use this strange, unsettling time to achieve great things.

They will do a Couch to 5k challenge, they will learn a new language, they will paint and draw and teach themselves how to play the piano or the guitar. They will create definitive pieces of art inspired by this pandemic and I can’t wait to read those books and watch those plays and hear those albums. But we are all different and each of us will react to this in different ways. Some will be prompted to do, to create, to make. And others will want to hunker down, batten down the hatches until this is over. We will all find unique ways to survive.

Whatever your coping mechanism is, I think it’s useful to have some self-awareness around the behaviour. To be able to say, “I am over-eating today because I am scared and I am trying to comfort myself with this third slice of cake”. Or to acknowledge that the reason why you want to keep so busy — cooking and spring-cleaning, finding chore after chore to complete, a never-ending to-do list — is because you’re afraid if you stand still, even for a second, the enormity of this situation will hit you and you’ll crumble under its weight.

I would tell you that whatever you’re doing, now is not the time to judge the behaviours you’re using to get through this. We need to dig deep and reach for every ounce of self-compassion we can muster.

If there was ever a good moment to lower our expectations and give ourselves a break, this would be it. All we can ever ask of ourselves is that we do our best, but our best is going to vary wildly depending on a range of external factors — your ‘best’ during a global pandemic the likes of which the world has never seen before is not going to be on a par with what your ‘best’ was two months ago, and expecting it to be so will only result in disappointment and self-reproach, neither of which are helpful.

(This is extra true for parents! I can’t imagine how difficult this must be with children thrown into the mix.) Please, be kind to yourselves. Get enough sleep. Spend less time on your phone. Go for that 2km walk. And above all else, remember — this too shall pass.

Louise says:

Read: Pretending by Holly Bourne: One of Bourne’s greatest gifts as a writer is her ability to cut to the emotional core of her given subject and nowhere is that shown with more deftness than in Pretending. Honest, intense, funny, and insightful, this is a profoundly moving novel. I loved it.

Listen: Bandwagons: Fionnuala Jones is one of my favourite people to follow on social media and I’ve quickly become addicted to this excellent podcast in which she and her best friend Bríd shoot the shit about the week’s most pressing pop culture moments.