The simple question “How are you doing?” doesn’t feel so simple when it comes to figuring out how to answer it. There can be different answers for each day. Lately I’ve been all over the place: anxiety rising and falling, laziness skyrocketing some days, and eventually getting tired of being in the same place 24/7. I thought I was going to lose my mind.

At first it wasn’t that bad, but that quickly changed. I was stuck at home seeing the same faces that I grew up with. Every. Single. Day. It wouldn’t be so bad if everyone was doing their own thing, but of course that wasn’t going to happen. My siblings were constantly fighting and kept trying to make me either beat the other one up or solve the issue. My mom was trying to make me do like 6 things at once and my uncle would try to pick fights with me–‒ this is when I started to lose my sanity. 

Eventually I got so frustrated that I was basically doing nothing and staring at the same place that I moved into my legitimate bedroom. (It was being used for everything except a bedroom.) I took everything out that wasn’t mine and didn’t belong there, threw my books, hair products, and art supplies into a box; the list goes on and on. I completely reorganized my room and cleaned everything until I felt like my fingers were just bones. After that I settled in and felt 10x better. One window facing east and the other west. Change of scenery definitely helped me feel less stuck in the same place.

After about 2 weeks I felt like doing something; art, dance, maybe even finishing learning my third language. I ended up doing all 3 making sure I kept decently busy. Feeling mentally and physically stuck can be draining and bad for mental health and is one of the feelings I hate the most. Every now and then my friends would call or text pretty much the same question, “How is quarantine treating you”, and the typical response would be, “I hate it here.” Of course with more humor along with it, but I can’t type it in a way that you could pick up on it. 

Now to put down an actual answer to the main question at hand–‒ How am I doing? Overall I’m doing okay. Lots of ups and downs but creativity and activity is derived from all of this in the end. For example I painted Plankton holding a heart from Spongebob and I’m sketching up some more ideas. My mental health was wavering in the beginning but I think I finally got the hang of it this time around.

-Avigail