Quarantine Is F* My Mental Health Up

  Since quarantine begun where I live (currently Sao Paulo, Brazil) around mid-march, I had to (like almost all the people on planet earth) reorganize my entire routine to fit the new reality we were all facing. At that time I was waiting a call back from this company I had just done an interview at for an internship but of course that went to hell when we were all "forced" to lock ourselves up to escape from this evil virus which we all knew little about except for its deadly capacity to make you ill and possibly kill you. Now it's been over six months and things got overwhelmingly too much to handle and it's been really difficult to keep my sanity at its best.Specially when there's stupidity coming from all places imaginable. We're all watching the world from our homes and it can stink at times. 

  Everybody I know is desperately waiting for this miraculous vaccine to be available to the general public so we get immunized and be able to go back to the way we were before all of this. However, I'm not so sure things will return to the normality, at least not like we expect. I follow the news every-day, all-day so I have a better perception of where we're heading and I know it might be dangerous to be that wired on the news all the time but that's how I personally chose to get through this. It's not that life was perfect before Covid-19, for a lot of people it was already unbearable back then but now it became much worse for a much larger amount of people and it has taken lives as well as our mental health away. Things have changed, forever. We must embrace that.

  I'm currently on a path back to sanity. I'm trying to find what was fine before to make sure I keep them that way. Not everything is falling apart. There are an enormous amount of work and money being spent right now to bring back our ordinary lives. We have to appreciate that, big time. I personally, was able to filter a lot of toxic relationships I had with some people in my life during this process. I was able to see some of those people's true colors for the first time. It gave me courage and motivation to ban those toxic people outta my life. My family got closer, my siblings are different, my parents likewise. I found myself working with something that I've always been passionate about which is Art, I finally took the chance and became a Tattooer and my relationship with my boyfriend grew even stronger. 

  Of course I wish thousands of people were still alive and we wouldn't have to go through this process of illness and grief but I believe in the human capacity of finding meaning in every situation. It is this very ability that we all have that brought human-kind to where we are now. I believe soon enough we will find the vaccine and our lives will indeed improve but never like before, which is fine. We're stronger minded, more cautions, kinder and compassionate toward others and I intend to take these values with me after this quarantine is over. It was a lesson that we all had after all.

Hugs,

Douglas