As part of a community “postal art project” that started recently, my daughter and I were tasked to come up with a word that describes how we feel about a space in our home or garden after spending so much time in our homes over the past year. Once we chose the word and the space, we were meant to create “word art” using objects from the space.

Although the space we chose was the same (our dining room), the words we chose were not.

My daughter chose the word “trapped” to describe how she feels about our main dining/living space. Before that word, she listed off “alone” and “bored”.

ALONE AND BORED!?!?! 🤯

I had to remind her that she was surrounded by us and that between her toys, book reading, horse riding, dance classes, and Nintendo Switch sessions, she has literally never felt what it means to be bored. She is not even a teenager yet, and her choosing this word was a subtle troll of us not letting her have playdates with her friends whenever she wants (i.e. daily).

Ah well, despite “trapped” being very literal, she described how this word has a double meaning to her and I have to tip my hat to that.

I chose the word “full” and thought it was very clever of me. See, the dining/living room is where we literally eat all of our meals, but it is also the place where we do all our art, play our games, and do our exercise (the Peloton is there). Get it? Clever right? I feel physically full but also mentally full when I’m in this place. I know, I know, genius-level stuff right there. Don’t worry my daughter is walking away in disgust whenever I try to explain this cleverness. Still, I like it.

I think that our two words work really well to describe the dichotomy of life over the past year: trapped full.