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I Took a Post Election Mental Health Day Yesterday
2020 has been a lot. Don’t forget to take care of yourself.
So far this morning I’ve taken a shower, cleaned the bathroom, tidied up the kitchen, eaten a healthy breakfast, and gotten in an hour of productive writing. And it is only 9:00 am.
Yesterday was not like today. Yesterday was the day after the election.
Tuesday was election day in the USA. I live abroad so returns started coming in in the middle of the night. I watched for an hour then headed to bed. After a couple of hours of sleep, I woke up and turned to the BBC and Twitter again. I watched long enough to know that it wasn’t the overwhelming blue tsunami of my dreams before heading off for another couple of hours of sleep.
At 6 am I admitted to myself that more sleep was not possible for me. I was up and perusing all the news sites. By 9 am I had had all that I could take. I wanted to have a productive day but clearly, that was not in the cards for me. I was a bundle of anxious energy that I could do nothing about.
So I decided to give myself a pass on productivity. I gave myself a pass on feeling guilty about obsessively following the news for the latest counts and projections and I also gave myself a pass on stepping away from the news entirely for large stretches of time.
