Hospital Diaries Pt. III
In isolation, the imagination becomes a survival strategy.
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I think I’m the only patient who hasn’t decorated my “quad” (my section of a hospital room I share with three other patients). One of my neighbours, an energetic mom, transforms her quad into a hygge nest within an hour of arriving: lining the windowsills with cute metallic baskets, swapping the hospital blankets for her own cozy fleeces. She loses track of time building Lego sets. Within a week she’s built a miniature KFC and Walmart. We hold them up close to our faces, peering inside the little storefront windows, gushing at the tiny dining booths.
I love visiting other quads—when I pull back the hospital curtain that divides our space, I enter another world; a warm home distinct from the sterile ward outside of it. Everyone adjusts the lighting to make it their own, moves the furniture, even if it’s just angling one piece slightly differently. Photos of family and friends, drawings and sympathy cards line the walls. No matter how small the space, everyone builds their own little world.
Maybe it’s human nature to nest. This was the year of home improvement projects after all. Amidst all the uncertainty and distress, people built their own enclaves of safety, by making their homes more comfortable. Me? I don’t nest. I leave my quad barren, like my apartment, which I still haven’t decorated despite moving in two years ago. Untethered from physical objects, my focus diverts outward. I notice more with the freed mental space. Like how every day from 4:25pm to 4:27pm, my pink hospital curtains cup the warm sun streaming through un-adjustable blinds, filling the space with a hazy peach glow.
If isolation gets me to notice, then changing scenery makes me present. I switch to another quad and then another room, and with each move I re-calibrate for my new environment. I notice the consistencies in my new view—like a smoke stack that never stops wafting. I play Frank Sinatra to transport me back to New York, because billowing smoke paired with a muted city soundscape feels disjointed. I let my imagination go, drift to the sights and sounds of NYC.
This year, the imagination proved to be a useful skill, a survival strategy to get us through isolation. Our imaginations are what made our screens portals to other worlds—we needed it to feel engaged in a zoom call or to escape into a TV show. But the imagination is a double-edged sword. “When that secondary world [the world of our screens] becomes the primary one…suddenly, we’re spending much, or most, of our time somewhere other than where our bodies are.” – Writes James Poniewozik.
Being present helps ignite the imagination, but let the brain wander too far and it can get stuck, ruminating on the past or the future. This year I watched people escape into nostalgia—re-watching a favourite series from adolescence or dwelling on a past relationship—but also obsess over the future, desperate for control—"when will everything be ‘normal’ again?” According to research psychologist Angela Duckworth, depression is a past-oriented emotion, while anxiety is a future-oriented emotion. Spending too much time in either mental space, then, can have real psychological consequences.
In the hospital, all it takes is a small trigger—that one patient who keeps playing a broken version of Heart and Soul on the piano—and my present mind has abandoned the moment for a childhood memory. I wonder about that patient, what world they’ve created that drives them to play that same short sequence over and over. In the hospital, I see how the imagination makes us too interior-focused. We adapt to isolation by building our own insular worlds, but this adaptive response can make us so caught in our heads that we become less adaptable. Suddenly, the outside world feels daunting.
A couple weeks ago, I took my first trip outside the ward to get lunch downstairs. I had memorized all the details of my ward, that now any new visual stimuli excited me. “How can these people look so bored when they’re out in the world!?” I ask my accompanying nurse, pointing to masked people lounging on public seats in the lobby, half-napping, half-scrolling mindlessly on their phones. Ordering at Starbucks, the words stumble out of my mouth. Walking becomes awkward; I don’t know where to place myself amidst all the socially-distanced bodies. I’d forgotten how to physically and verbally navigate the outside world. I thought my outing would motivate me to leave, but it only made me more afraid. My world shrunk so much that an expanded world, full of choice and unpredictability, paralyzed me.
When I leave the hospital for good, I’m so nervous to go outside (the first time in over a month), I pause before approaching the automatic entrance doors to pull out my phone—I needed a screen to mediate the overwhelm of fresh oxygen. In the car, I roll down the window to let the rain hit my face, to taste the damp, heavy air. Under lockdown, the downtown streets are quiet, but I’m mesmerized by all the movement. Once we’re on the expressway, the cars are moving so fast my eyes can hardly keep up.
When I was inside the hospital, I fantasized about the buzzing city I was missing on the outside. At night, I watched the flashing red and green lights of the CN Tower, illuminating itself for plane traffic. With the city under lockdown and fewer people flying, those lights feel irrelevant. They present an illusion of a pulsing city that is really a ghost town at ground level. I was so motivated to get back to the “real” world, but in reality, I would just trade one version of isolation for another.
This year my world shrank further and further and each time it did, I yearned for the previous living situation I’d taken for granted. When I was in the hospital, quarantining in my apartment didn’t seem so bad. When I was briefly put in an isolation room due to a COVID-scare, I longed for the freedom I had to wander around the ward the day before.
I needed to dream of another world, to tolerate the one I was in. But maybe we need that. Maybe this is the power of the imagination, something we see rarely in adults but often in children—it gives us hope.
Every night since getting out, I go outside before bed to look for planes passing overhead. I imagine the world they’re heading to and hope I might one day see it too.
Best,
Anna
Published 📝
Two holiday gift guides for Forbes (yes, I realize I’m a hypocrite for using “best”):
1) The Best Immunity-Boosting Gifts—I can’t guarantee any of these products will protect you against COVID-19 but they might give your immune system a boost. I was so happy to recommend two *local*, female-led businesses: Métange (Tanya Tan made this gua sha stone to help heal her own autoimmune disease) and RASA Ayurveda (everything is small-batch and thoughtfully packaged, I love their drink mixes and essential oil roll-ons).
2) The Best Gifts For Clean Eaters—This was tough to write because I have issues with the idea of “clean eating”—I don’t like assigning moral value to food. Here, I determined a food “clean” if it had a few, recognizable ingredients and/or had a sustainability component.
I recommend two products that should be on everyone’s radar: Ghia (a non-alcoholic aperitif—Antoni Porowski likes it, enough said) and DADA Daily Vegan Milk Chocolate Elderberry Boob Truffles (elderberry is my go-to for immunity, and these are shaped like boobs because proceeds provide doula services to families in need).
Oh and the Instant Vortex 4-in-1 Air Fryer. I like the crunch of some fried foods but don’t always feel so great afterwards—this fryer does the job with 95% less oil.
Reading📖
My zoom highlight of the year was a live interview I *attended* between friends and This American Life colleagues—Susan Burton and Ira Glass. It was about Burton’s new memoir Empty. Glass selected a question I submitted and Burton said it was a “good question”—that compliment from a fellow journalist carried me through the rest of the summer 🤣.
It’s a memoir about her being immersed in another interior world—one obsessed with restricting and binging. While she was anorexic as a young teenager, the period in which she engaged in frequent binging occupies most of the book. What I feel most is her anger, and it lights a fire early on that keeps me constantly turning the page.
“Burton ate because she was angry at herself; she’s angry at herself because she ate; it’s a circle of rage and shame that any addict can understand,” writes Claire Dederer. “The force of [her fury] makes us not just appreciate but actually feel the force that drove her to commit her actions in the first place. The result is a book that wields a fearsome intimacy.”
Like a true journalist, she sharply observes the world around her, and the context she adds prevents the book from feeling too insular, as memoirs often do.
“At Alfalfa’s we sold not only groceries but a fantasy that seduced me. Here, eating was a vehicle for personal transformation. One of the things I liked best was I got to see the way other people ate. Because food was deeply personal to me, I saw it as an intimate window into others. Groceries were revealing.”
Articles:
🥣 This excerpt from Empty—“The Way I Ate”—led me to Burton’s book.
🧠 Did you develop “quarantine brain” too this year? “The more privileged among us were locked inside with our guilt and fear and Wi-Fi. We were all extremely online, which felt like hotboxing off bad weed.” I wish E. Alex Jung would write non-celeb profile pieces more often.
👩🎨 When a portrait artist’s subject is reduced to a screen, the imagination becomes crucial. “A portrait on my easel provides the illusion of companionship. What a strange new loneliness,” Riva Lehrer writes for The New York Times.
👃 Leslie Jamison on losing her sense of smell due to COVID-19, “It’s an abundance we are constantly surrounded by and constantly ignoring. What an incredible thing, to lose it and then wake up to it again, newly attuned to the simplest pleasures.”
💰 Are we living in a velvet rope economy? Meghan Palmer questions what will happen if travel, leisure, education and health become more privatized, where the wealthy pay a premium for better service. “The middle class used to be a safety zone. America needs the middle class to function. But with every premium service divide, comes the opportunity for the middle class to spend more money just to live a “normal” life, all while wages are stagnant and the cost of living goes up.”
🐿 Isolation leads some people to build worlds for the critters. Tiny tacos, vegan sushi, and mini-almond crust pizza are just three of the dishes on the menu at this DIY chipmunk cafe. This story softened me.
🛍 This year’s lockdown uniform: sweatpants. Why do people love to hate them? “There is an element of fat-shaming in the dislike for sweatpants,” fashion historian Valerie Steele says.
😴 Not sleeping well? Your diet might have something to do with it.
🏠 And if isolation has you feeling stuck in your “box of daily experience,” this comic might help. “We tend to overestimate the pleasure brought forth by new experiences and underestimate the power of finding meaning in current ones. Who we are inside a venue matters far more than the venue itself.”
👥 Or, an alternative solution, turn your attention outward. “Rather than fixating on our inner worlds and woes, we can strive to promote what some psychologists call ‘small self,’” to help us feel better this winter.
Watching 📺
I recently watched Love Actually for the umpteenth time. Those opening and closing scenes are especially tear-inducing now that we can’t hug our loved ones. I love the early 2000s style, and how young everyone looked. Like Keira Knightley—I can’t believe she was only five years older than Thomas Brodie-Sangster (who plays the grieving/love-struck boy Sam) when it was filmed.
As for TV, I’m still making my way through Enlightened, it’s the only show worth mentioning that I think might not be on your radar. I’m also rediscovering Seinfeld on cable. While I wasn’t a huge fan growing up, it definitely dishes up the same comfort that so many nostalgic 90s sitcoms set in NYC do.
Listening 🎧
Are you a hoarder (digital accumulation counts too) or a purger (you get rid of everything)? This No Stupid Questions episode gets into it.
I knew hoarding was an OCD tendency, but I’d never thought about how for every pathology, the other extreme can be just as pathological.
“We can over-eat, we can under-eat, you can Marie Kondo every second of your life to the point where you throw away your parking receipt before you’ve cashed it in.”
Another important distinction—the “O” in OCD is obsessive (the thought) while the “C” is compulsive (the behaviour). If you don’t act on the obsession, it’s just a thought, and it’s only a problem if it causes you distress.
“Wherever you fall on this continuum (whether you’re a hoarder or a purger), you should ask yourself how you feel about that. You have to distinguish between what you want and what you want to want.”
And—how much of your time do you think about the past vs. present vs. future? Noticing where your mind is at can be useful to prevent anxiety or depression if you’re overly stuck in the past or obsessed with the future.
We are very happy to hear that you are out of the hospital Anna.
Excellent piece, will read it a few more times to check out all the links you included. Will remember for future reference the time focus of depression vs anxiety