And So What

Don't you understand / Your mind is not your friend again / It takes you by the hand / And leaves you nowhere (The National)

In February, I fell ill with pneumonia.  If you’ve never had to change your sheets in the middle of the night, every night, for seven days straight, because your fever spikes and you soak through the bedding - consider yourself lucky.  I would wake up around 2am in a literal bath, sweat coming out of every pore, my pyjamas so heavy and sticky that I could almost wring them out.  Although I was very weak, achy, and wheezy I would motivate myself to get out of bed, strip the sheets off, change into a fresh set of clothes (by the second night I’d learned to keep clean supplies by the bed) and re-make the bed with a crisp set of linens.  I would then go back to sleep for a few hours, and repeat the whole maneuver around 8am (minus the getting back in bed).

Fortunately or unfortunately, my husband was out of town that week.  He suffers from asthma so a possible contagion would have been risky; him being away also meant that I could engage in my strange new nightly routine without waking him up.  On the other hand, it meant being alone with Mr Pneumonia, an unwelcome visitor who liked to mess not only with my body but also with my head.

By that point in the year, I had been “funemployed” for about five months, and living in Lisbon for two.  My first few months of freedom had been spent in London, enjoying the crisp fall weather (is there anything better than Hampstead in October?), trying out the latest bakery openings (I even made the trek from North London all the way down to Camberwell, and tried Grove Lane Deli and Toad Bakery - both well worth the hour-long trip, especially since GLD has since closed down), and preparing for our impending move to Portugal.  We arrived in Lisbon in late November, just in time for us to dodge the UK winter.  Winters in Lisbon are usually mild; this one was particularly warm.  We spent our first few weeks exploring every nook and cranny of the city, making lists of all the restaurants we needed to try, and learning bits of Portuguese on the fly.  We settled into a new routine that consisted of lazy breakfasts, walks around the neighborhood, personal training sessions, and afternoon adventures across the seven Lisbon hills.  We even went to the beach in January; in the 22C degree weather it seemed that spring had already arrived.  In the midst of all of this, we also had my parents over for Christmas, we flew to my sister’s for New Year’s Eve, and a dear friend of mine visited all the way from NYC. 

In other words, I had spent my first five months off work being distracted and entertained.  And then Mr Pneumonia showed up, and he brought some friends with him.

During the day, I would lay supine on the sofa, unable to move.  My head was pounding, my joints ached, and I tried to save up what little energy I had left for my hourly coughing fit.  My lungs sounded gurgly and just walking across the living room to the kitchen would leave me breathless.  Focusing was difficult; I would read two pages of a book or watch fifteen minutes of a TV show and have to stop.  And so, worst of all, I started to stare into the vast nothingness that was my life.

I was hit with a wave of mental unwellness that would put the Nazare break to shame.  As it turned out, I had been fooling myself all along - life without work wasn’t fun.  It wasn’t cool.  It wasn’t even relaxing.  It was actually deeply unsettling and soul-sucking.  All of a sudden I had no sense of purpose, no utility, no community, nothing to get up for in the morning, nothing to look forward to.  I would never be part of a team again, or do anything of value.  My life as I had once known it was over.  And of course, it was all my fault.  

Well hello there, Mrs Depression and Mr Anxiety, nice to meet you, how long have you and Mr Pneumonia known each other?  And is that Miss Despair I see over there?  Why don’t you tell her to come on over.  We’ll have a grand old time whispering sweet nothings to my weakened brain all day long. 

During one of my daily FaceTime calls with my husband, I shared my new findings with him: the emptiness, the lack of worth, the lack of meaning.  It was all very factual and data-driven, of course.  No room for doubt.

“Oh Eva,” he said.  “I think maybe now’s not the best time to be thinking about these things.  The illness is making you look at everything negatively.”

EVA

So you don’t feel any of those things yourself?

HUSBAND

No, we have a great life.  We’re enjoying ourselves.  We’re very fortunate.

[Pause]

HUSBAND

But I think this kind of life is great for a time.  We won’t be able to do nothing forever.  After a while you need to use your brain, to be of service to the world, to do something.  And we will, of course!  Otherwise it all gets a bit…

EVA

…

HUSBAND

You know, a bit like that show…

EVA

…?

HUSBAND

The show with the women… the sequel to Sex and the City…

EVA

Wait - 

HUSBAND

And So What.

[Eva starts laughing uncontrollably, which triggers a violent coughing fit.  She drops the phone.  Almost falls off the couch.  Tries to catch her breath to respond but every time she’s about to start talking she laughs again, which triggers the cough, etc etc.]

[After a while, Eva calms down]

EVA

You mean… [gasping for air] And Just Like That?

[Laughter and coughing resume]

HUSBAND

Yeah, And So What.  And Just Like That.  Whatever.

I’m fairly certain this bout of laughter cured my pneumonia (there was a 50-50 chance that I’d either heal through laughter, or that this particular coughing fit would prove fatal).  It certainly scared Mr Pneumonia’s friends away - from then on Mrs Depression, Mr Anxiety, and Miss Despair made themselves scarce.  But also, “And So What”, though awkwardly phrased and definitely not the title of a sequel to Sex and the City, became an all-encompassing catchphrase.  

It captured the aimlessness of some of our days - the kind of day when running a simple errand seems to take up the whole afternoon, when you look back in the evening and are unable to account for the hours that have passed since breakfast.  It captured the latent uncertainty we constantly felt but did not often acknowledge, not being sure when we’d put an end to our extended holiday, or where we’d move to next.  

Today I went to the gym and the grocery store.  I ate three meals.  And So What?

I haven’t spoken to anyone other than my husband and my PT this week.  And So What?

I’ve read every book in this flat.  And So What?

But also, it captured a certain insouciance, a sense of optimism, a lightness.  It became a way of detaching from all of the questions and worries and doubts - to instead focus on the present moment and enjoy our free time more mindfully.  

All our clothes are in storage and I’ve been wearing the same pair of shoes for 6 months.  And So What?

We may never go back to live in London.  And So What?

The A/C is broken.  And So What?

In fact, it became a way for me to look at my pre-Lisbon life with a new perspective.  Perhaps I’d mistaken being busy for feeling whole.  My days in London were a literal and figurative race: I ran 5k in the mornings, I ran from meeting to meeting (always late), I ran through my inbox, I ran to the shops, I ran on adrenaline, I ran myself ragged.  I didn’t have time to think about whether I was truly spending my time on what mattered most to me; I liked my job and I liked my coworkers, and that was enough to prevent me from asking myself too many existential questions.  But now, post-pneumonia, looking back, I doubted whether I’d truly felt a deep sense of purpose.  Sure, I had taken pride in my work and could list out many accomplishments on my CV.  I had driven change and delivered growth.  I had hired, worked with, and worked for truly wonderful people.  I had felt a sense of duty when problems arose or when my team faced obstacles.  Yet, [in my best Carrie Bradshaw voice] “I couldn’t help but wonder, And So What?”

And So What has kept on nagging me - not just as an inside joke with my husband, or as a shortcut response to a question or comment, but also as a prompt to examine my life with more curiosity and perspective.  And So What pushes me to find out what, exactly, would give me a true sense of purpose.  Not a sugar-free, low-fat version of purpose (the kind that you get from having a busy day of meetings, which is almost always paired with a hunger for holidays) but an earnest feeling of flow and completion.  The high of being exactly where you need to be, doing exactly what you should be doing.     

Writing, it turns out, gives me that feeling.  It’s not the only activity that does; it’s also probably not the thing I’m best at (or even great at, in the grand scheme of things).  And So What?  It gives me joy, purpose, and flow, so I’ve decided to invest a bit of time into it.  For similar reasons, I am consciously investing more time into cooking, walking/hiking, reading, and mentoring.  Eventually I will get back behind a (real) desk, and little by little I am becoming clearer on the types of companies, missions, and roles that will provide me with a purer feeling of purpose.

Three or four days after that fateful And So What / uncontrollable laughter / deathly cough FaceTime call, my fever finally broke. Getting my breathing back to normal took a bit longer, and I struggled to climb the Lisbon hills for a few weeks after recovering.  I’d also lost a lot of strength; getting back into the gym was humbling. 

But the depression fog lifted just as quickly as it had initially descended, and left very few marks.  If anything, I had a newfound appreciation for the ease with which I could go through life now that I was no longer ill.  I was grateful for the smallest things: sleeping through the night, feeling hungry, going for a walk, focusing on today rather than worrying about what the future would hold.

And Just Like That, I was cured.