Five Healthy Coping Mechanisms during COVID-19

These healthy coping mechanisms helped me through early on in the pandemic, and I should be talking about them (consider them recommendations.)

Positive Lists
A regular list of positive things-daily, weekly-all things count, both banal and monumental, from cleaning the kitchen to checking something off my list to getting through a day to leaving the crossroads I reached in revising my second horror novel and the ensuing weeks of blocked agony. Did I pay a bill today? Clean the litter? Did I leave the house? Did I make someone laugh? I make someone's life better? Put it on the list, eh? My pandemic philosophy? Something is better than nothing.

The Physical Stuff
Stretching every morning, working out, doing push-ups and sit-ups every other morning, dancing spontaneously, walking around the neighbourhood when weather permitted. Daily walks became paramount to my daily routine, for so many reasons, particularly in long, quite stretches of time when the street was quiet at night and we huddled indoors too much during the day. Post-pandemic lockdown, I also adopted stretching before bed, and also sitting and meditating for a count of ten slow breathes, letting everything else in the wide world of the household shift and move and breathe around me.

Watching Movies, Shows and YouTube
From renting at my local, Movies 'N Stuff, but also borrowing so many treasures from the Ottawa Public Library, kanopy, as well as itunes, Netflix, DisneyPlus. I explored YouTube for virtual panels, ComicCon@Home 2020, TylerCon, the KGB Fantastic Fiction series out of Manhattan, run by Ellen Datlow and Matthew Kressel.

Podcasts
Primarily, I dig John Siuntres’ Word Balloon outta' Chicago, my go-to podcast for in-depth, sportscaster-style interviews with comics creators. I found Sasha Wood's Casually Comics on YouTube hilarious, irreverent, pithy and sexy.

And Additional New Podcasts
Theses include Bi History, the punchy and informative Bisexual Killjoy, the amped Comic Book Couples Counseling, particularly their Stampies episodes, with the years'-best lists and guest contributors, the What Went Wrong podcast about successful films that nearly went horribly awry, WTF with Marc Maron, What Magic Is This?, a thoroughly-researched podcast for all my Wiccan and Chaos Magic and Aleister Crowley and Alan Moore needs, The 250 to get very Irish takes on many different popular films, Missing Frames for all things Superman, and Fatman Beyond for my comic-book-film and geek-culture fix.

Books and Graphic Novels
Reading queer-themed books such as Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, Sonya Taaffe's Forget the Sleepless Shores: Stories, Adam McOmber's Jesus and John; comics. Also, I discovered John Allison's wonderful and life-full Giant Days recommended by Amal El-Mohtar, Gail Simone's Clean Room, a vast conspiratorial number reminiscent of Grant Morrison's The Invisibles, if that's possible...; anything by Tom King (thanks, rob mclennan, for recommending!), but also modern great comic writers Chip Zdarsky, Greg Rucka, Mark Waid, Jerry Ordway, and Alex de Campi.