Splash No. 265 - Tales from Isolation
Tales from Isolation
I got Covid again. Thankfully, my symptoms are mild and the experience hasn’t been too bad so far. It’s been nearly a year and a half since I had it last, but my body seems better prepared to deal with it this time around, and my mind does as well.
I’m on day five of isolating as I write this, spending most of my time in my room, some time in my bathroom, and an occasional hour on my roof to get some fresh air. Thanks to the isolation, I’ve spent countless hours over the last few days scrolling through social media. As you’d expect, this started to mess with my head after a little bit, as I found myself comparing every part of myself to every part of other people.
I reflected back on the people I’d met over the last few weeks and how many of them didn’t follow me back on social media. I wondered about all of my deficiencies — whether working harder on crafting a better digital presence, or creating more interesting art, or being more likeable would’ve made it more likely for them to follow me back, and acknowledge me. I started to think about all of the things that I could work on or do in order to fix these parts of me. Perhaps I just needed to grind harder on cool poetry sites or be funnier or make more content.
With covid, I’m afraid of getting long covid, but the internet tells me the only thing to do is to take my vitamins and rest as much as possible both during infection in the next few weeks after infection. So, exercise is off the table for a little while. My dreams of getting into basketball or tennis or getting to my dream body through lifting have to wait for a few more weeks, and I’ll have to accept that. But with that, and with my social media woes, I realize that all I’m doing is delaying my happiness needlessly. There will always be a new thing to fix, a new sense of lack that I need to fill.
I heard a story of Buddha’s enlightenment—as he sat near-death attempting to fast his way to enlightenment, he became frustrated with the whole experience and decided to break his fast with some rice pudding under the bodhi tree, giving up on his goal of reaching enlightenment. In that moment, he achieved enlightenment, since his desire for it had been holding him back the whole time. Thinking about this made me start to contemplate meaning in life again. Was it even worth it to chase these smaller base desires? And would chasing them even get me to what I really sought: connection?
Over time, my TikTok feed slowly morphed into a series of poems and a type of content called corecore, which involve clips spliced together that focus on emotional topics, usually related to men’s mental health and meant to evoke emotional reactions. And evoke they did—I found myself overwhelmed with emotion, hearing about the suffering and loneliness of many of these people. And as a salve, there were the poems, reminding me of the beauty that art could bring to me. In the face of the boringness brought upon by my isolation, I felt like I lived fully through the range of emotion I could experience through everything I consumed.
I’ve spent a lot of my life trying to be realistic and even-keeled. Yet, the more that I consume art that moves me, the more I wonder about the merits of this sort of thing rather than being emotionally moved by the world around me. Considering the shortness of life, the unpredictability of it all, why not let everything move me? Why shouldn’t I let myself fall into despair and sink into the depths of it, just as strongly as I can feel awe at sunrise, just as strongly as I can laugh until my eyes tear up? Stoicism and Eastern Philosophy often preach equanimity, but it feels like a shame to not lean into these emotions while we still can. Isn’t it special that we can feel them at all?
Drops of the Week
ALBUM - LOUIE by Kenny Beats - easy listening
POEM - "The Orange" by Wendy Cope - And that orange, it made me so happy, As ordinary things often do
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Soon to be free,
Nikhil