There's Gonna Be a Storm

By the time this hits your inbox, there will be between 12 and 22 inches of snow in New York City, a place I have lived for over 20 years and one that is perpetually unprepared for any amount of snow or any measure of cold. It hits different this year, of course, because so many of us have been inside of our homes for so long, but the childhood giddiness still lives inside of me: How much snow will it really be? Will things be cancelled? Can we make stew? Can we make brownies?

I've always been the kind of person who leans hard into coziness. Earlier this week, my friend Blair mentioned that her favorite book as a child was The Little Princess. It was mine too: I could feel in my bones the lack of warmth that little girl had in her life, and I could picture how lonely she was; I could also envision how warm and bright and wonderfully cozy it all must have been when her true self was discovered. I used to read that book every winter, curled up in an armchair in my room, until I fell asleep at what felt like the crack of dawn but was probably closer to 10PM. 

Over 30 years later, my desire to be cozy hasn't changed, nor has the sense that when things feel wrong and stagnant, they can be righted and go technicolor at any moment. I've been thinking lately about what it will be like after enough of us are vaccinated that the world can swing back to some sense of what we once called "normalcy." Will I be able to adjust? Will I be okay? 

The truth is that I know I will, and I know that most of us will, because I have done this before. I am uniquely positioned to understand re-entry into a "real world" from isolation, because it was a big part of how I became "an immunocompromised person" in the first place. Over sixteen years ago, I spent three months in the hospital working through my illness and my diagnosis, a month of which was in a medically-induced coma and the month thereafter in which I spent the bulk of my time learning to walk again because man, no one warns you in advance the rate at which muscles atrophy. 

But that's not the point: The point is that I can tell you from personal experience what it feels like to have paused your own life while everyone else's feels like it has moved on, and how it feels to try to catch up to what's going on in the world regardless of what's been going on with you personally. It will feel at first, no matter how much you've been "out and about" during the pandemic, like you're a little baby bird trying to keep your legs straight as you walk through the world. You will marvel the first time you're shopping in a store and you buy something you think you'll look good in. The first day that you go back to the office, you'll remember just how bad office lighting is, and your digestion will falter when you try to feed your body a Sweetgreen salad because no matter how healthy you're trying to be in the real world, your body would really prefer if you'd feed yourself stuff you cooked. 

You will realize that no matter how much you've tried to keep up, your friends have secret languages, because there have been text messages without you. There have been huge landmark personal moments and struggles without you. (Half of your friends are probably about to be divorced, and you had no idea!)

But you will also learn that at the end of the day, you haven't missed as much as you thought because nothing really happens unless really big things happen. If you aren't grieving the dead, or trying to figure out how to survive because you lost your job, you're lucky. Even if you have to teach yourself how to walk into the world again and get on the subway (or into your car, or on the train, or on a plane), you're lucky. You may need someone to help you into it, but you'll quickly forget that you’ve ever forgotten any of it.

I'm pretty bad at remembering things in the short term, and to be honest, I'm grateful for that. It makes it easier for me to move on when I find myself in a place that I shouldn't be. But I remember every minute of my life in the month or two after waking up from a coma, because it felt to me like everyone was asking me to do what they thought were simple things, but to me those things were hard as hell. I suspect that when we re-enter "real life," we'll all feel like that, no matter what we've been through.

All I can say in preparation is this: Lean into the coziness while you can. It is bad to be limited in what we can do, but while we are, let's be grateful if we are able to stay home during a giant snowstorm. (If you are a health care professional or a service worker and you can't, we love you and we hope you are safe!) It seems certain that we will also be back into the world soon enough — at different times, and at different paces — and the best we can do in the meantime is be as cozy as we deem it possible.

A Very Solid Recipe: Beef Stew With Beer & Paprika

Listen to This Shit: Spoiled Love, By Buzzy Lee, on Apple Music 

You’re reading “Soup and Despair,” a weekly newsletter by Sarah Flynn and Rebecca Orchant. It’s about food, feelings, and surviving the dark times. If someone forwarded you this email, it’s because they love you and they want you to eat. You can subscribe to it too!