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Neutral Colors Got Me Through 2020

As a Black woman with mental illness, I dealt with *everything that’s been going on* by painting everything white

That’s my cat, Lily.

Here in Istanbul, the first coronavirus case was announced just over one year ago. It feels like it happened yesterday in another lifetime, like some sort of spacetime dolly zoom.

In those early pandemic days, the “coronabrain” I basically already live with thanks to ADHD kicked into overdrive. My cluttered mental landscape mirrored the seemingly rhizomatic expansion of crap littering our shoebox apartment. During lockdown, which included a 14-day quarantine due to possible exposure to virus, the auditory onslaught from our argumentative downstairs neighbors made our 400 square feet feel even smaller. So we moved.

Our new apartment is much larger and semi-detached, so it feels like a small house. I now have an office with a door and IKEA Billy bookcases to display my yarn stash. There’s a nifty skylight that you open with a chain. We…