Quarantine Chronicles: I’m Sick of These Four Walls!
There is an indentation from my butt in my bed. I have braided my hair twice and started microlocs. I have started a workout regiment, and stopped a workout regiment, and started it again… and stopped again… I have perfected my fingernail painting technique. I have started doing my eyebrows again- thank God I am much better than I was in 2004. I am in dire need of a pedicure but keep painting my toes and grabbing my pumice stone in the shower. I AM SO SICK OF THESE FOUR WALLS!
I have purchased some new plants. I am the proud owner of a teenage monstera deliciosa. I have started a morning meditation zoom and I am hearing from God. Not everything about this pandemic is terrible, right?
I work in fundraising. I am currently working in a hospital foundation. My office is located in the hospital, so I was fortunate enough to get rather early information about COVID-19 planning. Back in March things were all over the place. My office was planning for a large event, and the world was bracing an onslaught of sick and dying patients. Lysol and toilet paper disappeared. Panic ensued, it’s America after all.
During all this, I was in peak depression. I was having panic attacks and all. I have no idea where any of this came from or what my triggers were. I knew I should have been talking to somebody because therapy is important, and it works but I just couldn’t. I didn’t know to say. I have friends who work in mental health who tried to help nudge me, to pull something out of me as a place to start, and nothing! Like literally it was this blank fog in my brain. Now, I don’t cry. I don’t emote, that’s just not something I do but I was randomly crying. I was able to get through the workday but once 5pm hit and I was in my car all bets were off. So, leading into quarantine I was a hot-behind-mess!
In trying to figure out what was going on, were all of this started I go back to the fall of 2019. I had been ghosted by someone I have been with on and off for like three years. Sooo much goes into that story I will have to share it another time, but I will share that that broke me. I had always been extremely guarded but let that down for him and whole situation broke me. It was hard but by winter I was able to listen to Janet’s Again without blubbering. (There is when I started crying *insert eyeroll*)
So, moving forward, what I thought was stemming from that whole situation was not. I was still feeling blah, but I wasn’t worried about him anymore. He was old news. Why am I feeling like this? God! What is wrong with me?
If you know me, you know I love me some Jesus, but I have a few reservations about the prescriptive way we worship him in our society. I have always been one to pray and study and find connection one way or another but in my post-college years that has meant that I am doing so independent from a church. I make my own community and seek out messages online. I have wonderfully challenging conversations with friends and study the word in my own way. Basically, I have been doing this quarantine thing church for years (to my godmother’s dismay).
While I was trying to figure out what in the hell was going on with me, we were going into quarantine, work was insane, and I felt so disconnected. I felt disconnected from people even with I was surrounded by folk, and I felt even more disconnected from God. I wasn’t talking to him, and he wasn’t talking to me. There was no relationship. I wasn’t reading my bible, I had no devotional plans, I wasn’t tuning in to anybody’s sermon and I wasn’t even listening to any sort of spiritual music. I kept finding distractions.
I was turning over my closet, I was buying new shoes. I finished the entire series of ‘Living Single’, ‘Tiger King’, and even got through some of ‘Hangin’ with Mr. Cooper’, ‘The Masked Singer’, and the newest season of ‘The Flash’. I watched ‘Wet Hot American Summer’ (highly recommended btw) and compared the old ‘It’ to the new one. I kept finding ways not to think which I realized I had been doing by busying myself before we all had to come inside.
For months I had not been sleeping. Into quarantine I still hadn’t been sleeping. I was distracting myself all day and lying awake frustrated all night. One night, God got my attention. I was awake and I prayed. I asked God to give me peace. I just wanted rest. God said to me that he had shifted some things and that which he moved was on the way to me. I felt it in that moment. I felt that shift in the atmosphere. The energy around me changed. I was able to sleep that night. In the following days I was able to pray again. I started doing small devotion plans. I was still foggy as ever, but I was able to do these small things. A few weeks later, God made a lot of things clear. He gave me a direction and told me incredibly clearly that no was not an option. We had a good conversation and it ended with my mind clear. That strange depression I was in was gone. It has been a few months now and I am literally chilling, I am good.
I had to say ‘yes’ to God. God calls each of us to do something and when we are not doing that thing life is hard, we are not walking in our purpose. It can feel like we are trying to walk against the wind, it seems impossible. Sometimes we don’t know we are not walking in our purpose and sometimes we think we are, but we are not. Over the past few months as I have dealt with life and been exploring my purpose, I have learned that your purpose lives around the thing that scares you but somehow comes easy to you but is hard. Mmhmm, I know what I just said.
We have dreams and visions. Sometimes they don’t make any sense but give them time. I get pieces of a vision. I don’t understand the whole picture, but I know in time I will. That’s what started Life. Breath. Words. I had a vision of a space for women to learn and grow together. I had a vision of a community of women from all over at all different points in life sharing our experiences and challenging each other so we can all become the whole women we were designed to be.
I am so sick of these four walls but sitting in them has forced me to examine my calling. These four walls have helped me to open my ears to hearing from God and allowed me the time to be reenergized and inspired to reach out to other women to share their voices here.
In the coming weeks we will hear from business owners, recent college grads, and new mothers, and women on a quest to use this weird gift from God to do the hard work of growing themselves. I hope you will come on this journey with us.
Written by Markita Latimer-Sport
