711: How to Be Alone
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A quick warning, there are curse words that are unbeeped in today's episode of the show. If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, thisamericanlife.org. It's this American Life, I'm Bim Adi Wunmi in For Ira Glass This Week. So back in early April, when we were still only a few weeks into lockdown in New York, a friend of mine asked me what things were like on Planet Bim. It was a joke, but it was one of those accurate jokes, because living alone right now, it is probably not that dissimilar to being a far away, solitary planet. New York was one of the first places to lock down, and in a way, I'm still living like it's March. I work from home, I leave for groceries, I attend almost no social functions. And it's not that I don't know how to be alone. Being alone, even in a crowd, is not new to me. We moved continents when I was very young, living between the UK and Nigeria. I went off to boarding school when I was 10 years old, I left home for university when I was 19, and I never really moved back home again. I've lived in London, Lagos, Berlin, and now New York. I chose to live in those last two places, to move far away from family and home. But there's something different about the aloneness of right now. COVID-19 has taken away that element of choice, like a 9-year-old being sent up to her room as punishment versus sitting in her room quietly reading anyway. The activities are the same, but the issue is control. So many of us have been dealing with this and forced aloneness a lot more since the pandemic began. Sometimes I feel like I'm floating through space, a sort of dwarf planet, in a galaxy that seems to be populated by planets with people attached, children, a partner, other family members, or maybe even housemates or a pet. I have none of those things at the moment. My family, my parents, my siblings, their partners, they're all in London, about three and a half thousand miles and a full ocean away, and basically a caricature of the elder millennial. It's just me and an ever-growing collection of houseplants and candles. And as I kept thinking about space and about distance, I realized, "Oh, I'm not a planet. I'm an astronaut." It feels like no one is psychically, if not physically, further away from their loved ones than an astronaut in orbit. So I found an astronaut, just to compare notes with. Leroy Chow, he's retired now from NASA, but altogether he spent more than seven and a half months in space. Can I ask a child's question now? Can you be bored in space? Is it different to Earth boredom? I think you, well, put it this way, we do have a lot to do. Even if a lot of the work is tedious work, it's still work that has to be done and it has to be done per the schedule. And if we didn't have that, it would be a lot more difficult because even though you've got this spectacular view of the Earth and you're taking photographs of all these great places. After a while, if you didn't have enough to do, it'd be pretty tough, you know? So the answer is yes. I think he was saying yes, you can absolutely get bored in space, even though they keep
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