A couple weeks into quarantine, when we still had the emotional bandwidth to joke about it, I recall seeing someone’s husband enjoying his new life in sweatpants, vowing never to wear “hard pants” (jeans) again. Approaching my fifth month sans hard pants, I’ve been trying to reflect on what I’m going to take with me from this chapter. Will I ever wear jeans again? How many more holes can I possibly poke into my ears? Will the existential dread that reared its head in March ever go away? Will I ever feel safe in public without a mask on? What’s the point of having my nose pierced if nobody can see it? When the social constraint of hard pants left, so did my ability to really check in with myself. I have a million thoughts in my brain, but once I actually sit down and try to work through them, […]