OK I’m bored with this pandemic now. It would be great if it could finish next week and we could go back to what it was like in that nice week in February after the bushfires and before the virus.

The big, strange overwhelming energy (panic buying! fear! what’s that cough mean?) of earlier weeks has given way to listlessness and ennui. The drama of the previous weeks now seems like the product of the virus’s signature fever.

Now it’s harder to summon the animation to sob over the sourdough starter as you listen to the morning news. That is if you are still listening to the news.

Sobbing and grief was real big March 2020 energy. We’re in April, and different people now.

Hello listlessness and lethargy. Iso life this week feels like those rainy childhood Sundays in the middle of winter: stuck indoors, nothing to look forward to, fighting with a sibling over a piece of Lego, the theme song of 60 Minutes with its ticking clock comes on – a sign that it’s time to go to bed, another dreary week ahead of school, homework and sport. Loathed midweek nights of goosebump blue skin and skinned knees, playing netball games on asphalt courts in the rain. The weeks blur and you think nothing good or exciting will ever happen to you. Nothing fun is around the corner. This time will never end. This is your life.

And so it is here.

Telephone conversations that only two weeks ago were full of high drama, life-changing news (I’ve lost my job! I’m moving in with my boyfriend of two weeks!), and vulnerable, brave declarations of love and fear, have now all flat-lined to this:

This week feels like those rainy childhood Sundays in the middle of winter: stuck indoors, nothing to look forward to

“Did you go to the supermarket today?”

“Yes.”

“Did they have any toilet paper?”

“No, still none.”

Silence.

The sound of someone stirring a pot of lentil soup.

“I should go.”

“But you have nowhere to go.”

“I know, but I’m going to hang up now.”

“Should I go to the supermarket for some Doritos? Or is that dumb? But I really feel like Doritos. Do you think l’ll get the covi? Imagine getting covi because Doritos.”

“I gotta run.”

“Run where? Should I get the Doritos?”

This is now every phone call ever.

For those of us who are not homeschooling or essential workers, we have been given a surplus of something we’ve always craved but have proven we don’t know how to deal with: time. There’s now so much time.

But this gift comes with restrictions: we can’t spend this time travelling or with friends, or in parks and beaches, or even with members of our family if we live apart.

This is time to spend by ourselves, in our homes.

This week the new smallness of life is truly beginning to sink in. The dominant mood is akin to that listless sensation you get from having spent too long on Instagram, scrolling. It’s the feeling of being too full and too empty all at once. Of seeing too much and seeing nothing.

It’s not just the phone calls. It’s the non-routine routine: getting up and then going back to bed, working in bed, working at night, sleeping in the day. It’s the same avo-crusted leggings for a week straight. It’s the Zoom drinks where your friends are now just a confusion of squares on a screen, talking over each other and dropping out. It’s the matted hair and mellow carb highs. It’s the glazed-eye nights on TikTok that end at 2am when your phone dies.

Every now and then a panicked thought finds its way through the mush: when is this bit going to end, this endless rainy Sunday? At least, through some incredible miracle of the internet, we can get dispatches from the frontline of our future.

Talking nightly to friends in other countries, where the virus is a couple of weeks ahead of us, they have travelled through the same emotional weather, albeit just a few miles up the road. Friends in London, Madrid, Barcelona and Rome had fear when we had complacency, anxiety when we had fear, grief when we had anxiety – and so forth.

This week: a friend in Barcelona can’t leave the house but says: “I’m fine actually. Cooking, reading, watching films and eating. It’s not so bad actually when you know everyone else is in the same weird-ass boat.”

A friend in Madrid has little children who haven’t left the apartment in two weeks. He is amazed and grateful for their resilience.

Friends in Rome and northern Italy are using the time to cook increasingly elaborate meals. They sound resigned but also relaxed. The fear has gone from their voices.

What these dispatches tell me is that the virus has forced us into a structure not of our choosing, but we just have to yield. This current listlessness will pass, and turn into something else.

Ahead of us all is pain. But also maybe stillness, acceptance, tranquility and gratitude. The only way out is through.

• Brigid Delaney is a Guardian Australia columnist