Last night I felt suffocated by claustrophobia.

I had a student doing a takeover on the college’s Instagram. Students send the content to me and I post it (we do not give out the login information). He lives in Oregon, so I expected his posts to go late into my night. I actually took the phone with me to bed so I could awaken when he sent a new text. Spence came to bed later and I opted to move to the guest bed so as not to wake Spence with every text the student may send into the night.

I had fallen asleep at 7:30pm; I moved to the guest room at around 9:30pm. Every few hours I would wake up and look at the phone in case I had missed a text. (It turned out the student sent his last text around 8pm my time…maybe he realized the time difference could be problematic. I probably could have asked when he anticipated his last post to be, but I didn’t want it to feel like I was setting a timeframe.) I would wake up and lie in bed and just feel like there was nowhere to go. Like, tomorrow I would wake up and go to my desk in the sunroom and stare at a screen most of the day. I would take walks to get out of the house and get some fresh air, but always back to the house. Typically this brings such comfort to me—I love our house and the space I have. But last night, it felt claustrophobic…like, I can’t leave the house even if I want to because there’s nowhere to go. Most everything is closed. I started to feel that tightness of anxiety filling my chest and then feeling anxious made me more anxious. Thank goddess for Jojo and George because they were both with me and would bring me back to earth when I started getting too wrapped up in how locked down I felt.

Today is the one year anniversary of my mom’s death, and perhaps that knowledge played a role in my claustrophobia last night, though, if it did, it was not conscious. Today, though, I woke and felt anxious…as if I couldn’t possibly sit at a desk and look at my screen for another day. I told Spence about my anxiety from the night before and he told me I should have woken him. I am so sick of this shit, I said. I’ve finally reached my limit. I can be completely locked in for just over a month but then I’m done. And I really want a burrito. I’m actually going to text my boss and ask her if I can take the afternoon off because I cannot bear to sit and look at my computer today. And I’m going to Chipotle, where ever it’s located, and I’m getting a burrito.

My boss okay’d the afternoon off, and my mood was actually lifted during the one Zoom meeting I had. It was to award a journalism fellowship. There were three of us on the deciding team and I had a feeling my top choice may not get it over another choice (all of the candidates were amazing, but I really liked one student (student A), in particular, though I knew the other student (student Z), who was the top choice for the professor in the group (student Z was also on my finalist list) was the most logical choice. The alumnus who was in the group representing the namesake for the fellowship (a deceased journalist who was a friend and classmate of this alumnus) also liked the student I liked (student A), as well as the top choice of the professor (student Z). And so as we were talking, he asked the fellowship coordinator if it might not be possible to award two awards, but not splitting the award—doubling it! So that each student would get $10,000 to start their journalism careers. He seemed to think he could get his classmates to contribute, at the minimum, $5000 and then those funds could be matched with the fellowship funds put aside. I have never been so thrilled to see the wealth of the alumni body put into action as I was this afternoon during that conversation. I said absolutely nothing as the alum was speaking with the fellowship coordinator (I didn’t want to encourage this idea at all since I was contributing nothing to it, but my eyes were wide in disbelief as they were talking it out). Once they decided that was the route they would take, the coordinator said, Okay, so who are the two recipients? And I immediately jumped in and said, for me it’s a no brainer—student A and student Z. The alum seconded that selection, and the professor said he would have gone a different route with the second student (my preferred student, student A), but that he had no problem with going with the selections the alum and I made, which included the professor’s first choice. (I should note this: the professor admitted to not reading two of the clips provided by my preferred student because they were in Spanish. The one he read was from the student newspaper and he thought it was not as strong as the others examples. Had he hit the Translate button at the top of the Spanish-language newspaper website, like I did, he could have gotten a fuller picture of my preferred student’s work, and I think he would have agreed with us. Side eye at the professor.) So I hung up knowing a student (two students!) who has the potential to do really remarkable work will be getting an added financial boost. I could have cried.

After that, Spence and I drove an HOUR to get a burrito at Chipotle (that’s how far away we are from everything). I was filled with anxiety on the way there—the kind that makes it feel like I can’t breathe. The kind that some people mistake for a heart attack. I tried breathing in and out and that helped. But what really helped, what really made me relax, was biting into that fucking burrito. Just a tiny bit of normalcy—a reminder that I’m not really trapped. That I have such good fortune in this devastating situation. That we can get out and pick up food from a restaurant we like and eat in the car. That we can see people out and about, wearing masks, also picking up Chipotle. After lunch, the weight lifted. Just a moment of normalcy was what I needed—a reminder that we’re all in this together, trying to adapt.