I have the COVID fog. Just to clarify, I have not tested positive for COVID. Yet.

I’m not unwell. I mean, not in the conventional sense of the word. But I feel like I’m under the grip of dense, COVID fog. Please don’t confuse it with the other COVID fog – the one people get after they have fallen ill because of COVID. What I have is not the same. Not at all!

In case any of you have been wondering why I haven’t posted any book blogs or knitting photos in the last few weeks – and I’m hoping some of you are – it’s because of this damned COVID fog. My state of fogginess is a direct result of being cooped up in the house for the last 1 year with only my husband, dog and occasionally, my parents for company. My brain has said ENOUGH! The timing is quite ironic because the lockdown is long over; I wasn’t quarantined even for a day, and now pretty much everything is open. In my case, when things were at their worst, I went through a very productive phase. I taught myself web design, started a website, and got people to read what I wrote – all during that phase. It felt like my brain was on fire. And today, you ask? It feels like someone stuffed my brain full of cotton balls.

You may wonder how you can diagnose if you’re going through something similar. Well, below are my symptoms. See if you have any of them too.

1. You start the day in front of your laptop; you end the day in front of your laptop and yet, no work gets done the whole day. You have tried to change this by making a strict hourly Time Table (it used to work when you were kids, remember!), by putting reminders on your phone. Heavens, you have even tried the famous Pomodoro Technique. Alas, no luck! Worse, when you peruse your browser history to see where all that time went, you realise you spent hours trying to find the best brand for fake nails and still, have nothing to show for it.

2. Every day you tell yourself that today is the day your new exercise regimen begins, aka a walk every day without fail. Come evening, you are still in front of your laptop and the fake nails are looking very interesting. You tell yourself, “What the hell! I can start tomorrow. Even the weather forecast is better for tomorrow.” The next day silver earrings become interesting; the day after the sexy kitten heels. Let’s just say, my walking shoes are gathering dust, but tomorrow still hasn’t come.

3. The Calendar is the most used app on your phone because days and dates have blurred into each other. You can’t remember which day of the week it is because each day follows a similar pattern, be it a Sunday or a Monday. Except for Fridays, because TGIF even if you’re only checking out fake nails online, right?

4. You make a To-Do list in which you painstakingly add new tasks every day, but turns out, the speed of addition of tasks is faster than the speed of their completion. No sweat! You make a shorter list in which you include only urgent tasks from the previous list. But since the speed of completion remains painfully slow, even that list gets pretty long. So you make another list, with the super-urgent tasks and so on. You know how this goes! You just wish someone had told you that the time spent in coming up with all these To-Do lists could have been put to better use for say completing a task on them. Sigh!

5. You make long lists of all the award-winning movies and shows that you ought to watch on Netflix, Hotstar, etc. I mean, everyone is talking about how good they are and that other one even won the Golden Globe. But the minute you switch on your TV, you forget the lists and turn to one of the many comedy shows on TV (it’s The Mindy Project these days), binge-watch the heck out of it, till the day you realise you have watched all 9 seasons of it in a matter of weeks. Phew!

6. You’re standing in the shower, daydreaming about god-only-knows-what (fake nails, Mindy Kaling?) and suddenly it strikes you that instead of conditioning your hair after shampooing it, you have done it the other way around. Or that you have shampooed your hair twice, or even worse, conditioned it twice. I mean, there are so many ways in which this could go wrong. All I can say is my budget for shampoos and conditioners has majorly gone up and my hair is not the better for it.

7. Last but not least, you realise your dog, Olof – who can only be photographed sleeping since that’s what he does the whole day – is no longer the person who sleeps the most in the house. No prizes for guessing who has displaced him from that position.

Is any of this happening to you? What are you doing to come out of it? Me? I’m patiently waiting for the fog to lift and for the blue sky to show its face again.

~P

P.S. It’s not like all that yarn I have stashed away is gathering dust. My dog is putting it to good use. See for yourself.

P.P.S. On re-reading this post, I realised I have used some unpardonable words which I usually don’t use in my posts. For just this once, ignore them. I couldn’t properly express myself without using them.