Hi readers, how have you been holding up? I hope everyone out there is able to stay healthy and that any quarantines, work-from-home measures, or shelter-in-place orders aren’t getting you down too much. In Minnesota, today marks the first day of a couple of weeks of enforced shelter-in-place, with leeway for necessary activities like going to the pharmacy or shopping for groceries. Restaurants with delivery or drive-through options are also operating. People are still allowed to “be in nature,” meaning we can walk outside and in local parks, which my husband and I have taken advantage of a few times already since we’re both now working from home. As much as I like being able to roll out of bed and log in to do my job, though, the social isolation and relative lack of bodily movement required of sitting at my kitchen table and tapping away at my laptop definitely has its downsides. Thank goodness for Nintendo and Animal Crossing, as I still get a chance to interact with my friends that way.
You’d think this would be a great time to catch up on some anime, and for many folks I think that this is the case. The anime club I attend has gone online-only for the time being (thank goodness for streaming apps!), so I’ve gotten a little bit through that venue. I was all ready to put together a schedule and indulge, but as you might have guessed from the lack of updates here, I ran into some (emotional) road blocks that made it difficult to want to do anything, much less consume anime and talk about it.
The completion of my episode 1 impressions coincided pretty closely with the culmination of my months-long infertility treatment. We had our first embryo transfer in mid-February. I was briefly pregnant before finding out that the pregnancy wasn’t viable. It’s something that I knew was a possibility, but having been closer than we’d ever been after over two years of “trying,” the pain of the loss, even as early as it was, was devastating. At that point, my desire to watch any anime was thoroughly diminished. Soon after that our clinic put a pause on all cycles (it’s considered non-essential medical services), so despite the fact that we wanted to “take a break” anyway, we were left without even the choice to move forward.
Normally around the end of March or beginning of April the anime convention (for which I’m part of volunteer staff) occurs – I run several panels, am a member of the programming department, and I manage the convention’s AMV contest. We got news mid-March that the convention was being cancelled for the year in response to the viral outbreak that was now starting to get pretty bad. Normally the ramp-up period to the con is where I catch up on a lot of my viewing, but with that no longer looming on the horizon, my desire to watch anything fell even further.
I’m not sure how many of you out there deal with depression, but I’m guessing those of you who do will be familiar with the sort of dawning realization that comes with acknowledging those feelings. For the last few weeks I’ve feel a constant low-grade anger and frustration with everything. Every disagreement I have with anyone feels completely blown out of proportion, and while I’ve gotten much better at making sure those feelings don’t get weaponized (meaning, I don’t argue and just walk away), the emotional aftermath for me sticks around for a long time. I took a break from the anime club Discord channel because of this; even passive differences-of-opinion were feeling personal. That’s when it dawned on me that it was the depression talking.
Anime is a hobby for me, but like all my other hobbies I have to be in the right frame of mind to interact with it in more than just the most passive way. Now that I’ve acknowledged and embraced the depression, I’m starting to feel as though my voice is working its way back to the surface. I’ve got a lot of half-baked ideas to work through, and I want to ensure that I’m writing those posts for a greater reason beyond just feeling angry about some anime-related interaction I’ve had while things have been bad. But those of you who’ve been here a while know that my writing has always had its own ebb and flow anyway. In these strange times, here’s to reaching out to one-another through a shared enjoyment of Japanese cartoons.