Grounded

A while ago, I came across this great list of words that mean their opposites and lately, I’ve been thinking about another one: grounded. On the one hand, this can mean “well balanced and sensible,” (thanks, Google Dictionary). But it can also, in its adjectival form, mean “(of a child being punished) not allowed to participate in social or recreational activities.” As a result of the pandemic, I’ve been living both definitions simultaneously. On the one hand, my days consist of the only things that truly matter–home, family, work, sustenance. In our nearly monastic seclusion, we’ve dropped off the hamster wheel of needless consumption, and it’s been quite liberating. Life feels pared down to its essentials (yet another word COVID has revised the meaning of). But it has also felt incredibly restrictive. And I find myself wanting to rebel against those restrictions in precisely the same ways I did when I was grounded as a teenager–namely, sulking, seething, sneaking out, acting up. The irony, of course, is that my current sentence is largely self-imposed, and I don’t know when it will end. I just didn’t expect to feel cheated out of the crime spree that would warrant this prolonged state of house arrest, though I suppose if I looked carefully enough, I could find an infraction or two.