In a pandemic, there’s no social distancing between work & home.

At this moment of crisis, we’re living – where talk of coronavirus and mass unemployment and collapsing food supply chains has replaced casual “water-cooler” shoptalk – it helps to go back and remember the basics. At least for people like me, it helps to remember and celebrate life as I once lived it: the daily routines of less than two months ago, before a quarter of a million human beings suddenly got their daily routines taken away from them – and died.

What do I remember from February and March? I remember breakfasts at home joking around with my son. I remember rushing to work on the train in the morning. I remember the fast-paced deadlines, the back-to-back calls, the team sprints and the looooong executive meetings. I remember the rushed lunches near Penn Station, chatting with friends. I remember the corny office drama and the ever so timely cringe worthy joke with a matching cringier punchline like they were all frozen in time – like calls on hold, waiting for me to press a button and have them start speaking again.

I remember the joy of working at a job with brilliant colleagues who I love and respect and occasionally make a jokes with. But above all else, I remember the luxury (that’s right, I said the luxury) of being able to return home from work and live my life – my own, private life – far away from my designated profession.

But that ain’t happening these days. Not anytime soon. In this era of social distancing, there’s one thing I can no longer separate: the distance between work and home.

Home – the place where I kick back with my family away from work – doesn’t feel completely like home anymore. It also now feels like an intrusion into my professional life. And it goes the other way around, too: I see my work intruding into my personal space like I’ve never experienced before.

Working from home during coronavirus has left me feeling like one of those grade-school stickers you peel from a paper; and when you try and stick it back on it no longer works, since the paper you tore it from has left its trace residue. “Unsticky” is how I feel. Unsticky and displaced, and worrying about the residue I left behind on that piece of paper (work), the reality hitting me. There is no longer any neatness or separation between the different parts of my life.

Everything feels a little off.

I’m guessing I’m not the only one out there feeling like this, right? It’s something we’re all going through – and it’s something we’ve all got to learn how to get through.

What do days look like now for most? You know the score: Virtual meetings with teams. Phone calls with bosses. FaceTime chats with clients. Exasperated text exchanges with (seemingly!) out-to-lunch freelancers. Hours of patient design-work spent at a laptop, listening to the distant wail of ambulance sirens as they streak along avenues and expressways beyond my window. Not just me right?

But I’m determined to end this on a positive note. Because I guess I’m hopeful like that.

So, here’s a story: The other day on Twitter, in between calls, I was watching this retweeted video with several hundred thousand “likes.” The video was from Spain, from a while ago, from before the pandemic hit New York hard. A young woman is in the middle of giving a business presentation over Skype or Zoom or whatever. She’s dressed in high corporate style, her face made up nicely, her hair immaculately brushed. But as she’s delivering her business report, suddenly you hear a man shouting from offscreen.

For the next few seconds, she ignores the sound of the man shouting. She maintains her cool veneer of “professionalism” and goes right on presenting. For a moment, you feel like she’s going to be fine. You feel like she’s going to make the sale and/or close the deal without any hassle. For a moment, you feel like she could probably teach acting classes on corporate etiquette and charge major sums of money.

But then (because this is Twitter, where disaster always strikes), the inevitable happens: her boyfriend wanders into the video, dressed only in his underwear, complaining loudly about something. Whatever it is, it’s got nothing to do with the business world. The woman pauses for a beat, frozen in embarrassment. Then she breaks out into a grin, as if to say, Lol see what I’ve got to put up with in quarantine!?

 I want to learn to be like that person – someone who’s able to balance the working world from home as best she can, but still capable of recognizing the strangeness and outright absurdity of being “professional” in a time of plague. So, while I miss the balance between work-life and home-life, I have to learn to live without it – for better and for worse. And I have to remember that in times like these, the puzzle pieces don’t need to fit perfectly in order to present a clear picture of what’s happening.

Join me next, when I discuss GRIEF...