The Art of Struggle

These last two weeks have been really rough for me. I’ve lost the motivation to do almost anything, especially schoolwork. As bad things continue to happen to myself, my family, and my friends, I’ve stopped seeing the point in doing tasks just to get a good grade. Why should I care about my grades when I should be worried about getting denied unemployment? 

Within two days, I’ve found out that two people I know have coronavirus. That’s been really hard. Even when I thought I might have gotten it when I came back from Europe, I wasn’t very concerned. But that’s because I can control what happens to me (for the most part). I can’t control what happens to those I’m not even allowed to see because of quarantine.

I’m starting to slip back into depression. Not exactly because I hate being in quarantine, but because of the loneliness. I don’t mind being at home, I’m usually more of a homebody anyway. I’m used to living in a sorority house where I can just walk down the hall and find someone to talk to. Now, I’m lucky if I text two friends a day.

I just can’t find the motivation to talk to other people. I don’t want to talk about coronavirus, and I don’t think I’m interesting enough to start a conversation with someone about how my quarantine life is going. I talk to my mom a lot because we’re quarantining together, but even then, there’s only so much we can talk about. I see my dad once a week, but still, all we can talk about is the virus. I miss telling stories. I feel like there are no stories to tell. 

Money’s getting tight. My unemployment hasn’t gone through for two weeks now, because there’s an ‘error in my account’. No matter how I try to address this error, I’m led to dead ends.

I’m one of the lucky students who wasn’t claimed as a dependent this year, so I should be getting a stimulus payment. But there’s a glitch in that system, too, and because of that, I have no idea when the payment is coming, or if it’s even coming at all. I check my bank account twice a day because I’m afraid of how low the numbers are getting. 

The silver lining in all of this is that my desperate need for cash caused me to be creative again. All of quarantine, I’ve been starting projects and abandoning them because I don’t see a point in finishing. I decided this week I needed to simplify, so I painted something unlike I’ve ever done before: just a few lines and shapes.

Normally, I paint and draw hyper-realistic portraits that take up to twenty hours. This new piece I made took just about an hour, and it was the first thing I’d finished in weeks.