April was always going to be an odd month, this year; there was a two-and-a-bit week period right in the middle of the month where my work schedule low-key imploded (intentionally so, but no less disruptively; there were conventions and editing and things that needed to be done that knocked my regular schedule and routine on their head) that felt like a black hole, pulling everything into it and warping the sense of reality surrounding it. There was a stretch where I worked eight days straight without a break, with a few of those days really long ones, and by the end of that, I felt notably off, as if my head has simply run out of power.
The thing about all of this, though, is that it’s happening at the same time as everything in the rest of the world — or, really, the rest of the country, with what used to be called “norms” and “the rule of law” breaking down at such speed and with such severity that it only added to the sense of having accidentally fallen off the face of the Earth and ended up somewhere that looked kind of the same but was notably, importantly, different in such a way that I couldn’t actually explain.
(At the end of that eight-day work stretch, I sat down to look at the news for the first time and saw that Trump was planning to withdraw all funding for public broadcasting; it seemed at once inevitable and the kind of thing that someone would object to, if we weren’t all exhausted by objecting to everything else that is arguably more important.)
There’s something to be said for that liminal feeling, when things just don’t feel entirely right, but not necessarily wrong, either. Even in such dire circumstances, to be able to sit there in that feeling just for a few moments and feel lost but not terrified is a wonderfully freeing thing.
And then, of course, reality sets in and you remember to be terrified again.