deodorant

One of my silliest, but most effective “pandemic tricks” was buying a fancy deodorant. It comes in a spray bottle and is from the brand Aesop, one of the cheapest of their eye-wateringly expensive products and still more than double what I’ve ever paid for a deodorant before. I wasn’t even sure how to pronounce the brand name until I glanced at it one day, my eye caught on the Greek root of the “ae” sound and I thought “oh, it sounds like paedophile“. 

It’s so silly but applying my fancy deodorant is one of the most reliably cheerful moments of my day. I am not good at describing smells, but the label says “vetiver root”, which makes me think of the REM song Find The River in which Michael Stipe sings about “bergamot and vetiver” in his singing voice that is so thick and rich that I don’t always like the sound of it. Sometimes it feels like too much, like a piece of kitchen paper in an advert that soaks up fluid until the paper is fat and blue. I don’t think this is the least relevant comparison to make. I bet Michael Stipe uses a fancy deodorant, probably something eco-friendly androgynous and refined like this one. He might even use this particular one, who knows.

I’m mostly just really grateful for a moment in my day that is so clearly defined. Putting on my deodorant draws a border between the grime of sleep and the clean, young day. Conventional wisdom on the pandemic seems to be that the best way to endure is to draw these lines – dividing up portions of your day, sticking to a clearly segmented routine, maintaining separate parts of your home for different activities, etc. I understand it – I’ve spent days working from the sofa, only to feel like an absolute couch potato when my work day ends and it’s time to relax… on that same sofa. It’s not even a large sofa. When you need to switch your brain between the different stages of your day – and activities that will demand very different emotional responses – outside stimuli can be really helpful, acting as doorways between one mode and the next. 

At the same time, there is often a gulf between our actions and our needs, even when we have no problem at all recognising that those needs exist. The urge to rebel can come from different places. The more restrictions we have to live with – and right now of course every part of our lives is being restricted – the more tempting the thought of lashing out. To be clear, I am pro-social distancing and I’m continuing to do just that, but it increasingly feels like there’s a certain model for social-distancing virtuously and that’s what I struggle with. Yes, I have cut my own hair and yes, that was probably a reaction to all the scolding articles I read online warning me that I would regret it. I don’t! And my boyfriend doesn’t regret letting me cut his hair either (that, or he’s kindly humouring me) (I didn’t cut off that much). I often skip the weekly NHS applause. Sometimes a carb-heavy day coincides with a day when I don’t even go out for my permitted exercise. I work 9 to 5 (or try to) but I struggle to stay “productive” in a lifestyle sense – writing every day, keeping the house spotless, reliably choosing novels over binging on Community (honestly, the episodes go down like tictacs). 

The longer the lockdown rolls on, the more of us are acknowledging how difficult it is to live this way. Getting genuine pleasure from anything is like a really difficult computer game with gold coins that can only be earned by forcing yourself through one arduous challenge after another. A few weeks in I was having a tough time when I couldn’t focus enough to enjoy anything. I kept starting books that turned out to be bad, my mind would drift off whenever I tried to focus on Youtube yoga and I’d end up crying. Everything I wrote was not just bad but an outpouring of my own feelings of sourness and hopelessness – it was less writing than wallowing on paper. Yuck. It even feels surreal to be outside of that phase now. World events are still, objectively, very bad, especially in the UK. I still miss every single member of my family. My thumbs are sore from texting and I wake up with swimming pool and ocean smells in my nostrils that linger after my dreams come to an end.

There’s a desperation for narrative right now, in the media and in our own minds. It’s been so bad now, for so long that it’s weirdly hard to believe it isn’t about to get better. It’s easy to fall into the belief that we’re owed an exit from this state of being, simply because we done our bit and taken our lumps and that’s the only fitting reward. Maybe this is why it feels so right to compare lockdown to depression – not the lapses in personal hygiene, not the lack of motivation, but the refusal of this phenomenon to adhere to a story. After all, the opposite of depression isn’t happiness, it’s the ability to manage and own your feelings rather than letting them control you. It’s acknowledging that lockdown days are still parts of our lifetimes and that the only reward we get for not losing a day to unbearable despair is just getting to live a relatively normal day. I find myself thinking a lot about that book We’re Going on a Bear Hunt. We can’t go over it, or under it. We have to go through it, so we may as well do so in our own style, and smell like a cool REM song all the while.