anxiety – MOIRARTS

Day 365

We knew this day would come. One year ago, I was so anxious. I was a ball of tension waiting to collect my child and bring them home that Friday, knowing that schools and workplaces were closing all around us and having resisted the urge all of that week to keep us all at home ahead of the decision we knew was coming. Parents were distancing, we weren’t hugging, we were using hand sanitizer. My friends who are microbiologists were emphasizing all of this as absolutely necessary; I was closely following what had happened in Italy and stocking our pantry and freezer well ahead of our area’s shutdown.

This year, I learned the ways in which anxiety has served me and pushed back against the ways it has not. I have struggled to relax out of hypervigilance for decades; I felt a degree of relief when my nervous system’s level of alertness aligned with the events going on around me, even if only through the early part of the summer. Once my child and partner were both working and schooling from home, I was much less anxious. This was an actual full-blown crisis, and my body is calm in a crisis. It’s a state of being in which it expects to exist at all times, an expectation that causes so many problems for me when there is not a global pandemic during a rise of fascism threatening all our lives. Last year, my nervous system was like, look, see, I was right all along. There is a lot to be said for not being right sometimes.

It is not my desire to recap the entire year we all just lived through. It was awful. Many people died. Many people became and are now ill. From COVID, from isolation, from stress, from an inability to access necessary care for ongoing health conditions. It remains awful.

Somehow, we are all going to have to learn to live again. Newly. Now, in this post-2020 state. With our survivors’ guilt, with our grief, with the health impacts we don’t yet know the full extent of. I have been thinking a lot about the AIDS survivors I knew the 90s, mostly gay men who had either dodged HIV entirely or had lived long enough with HIV to arrive at the state where the drugs began to keep people alive for good. In 1997, a longtime survivor was someone who had lived with HIV for 10 years. We don’t even use that language anymore, but believe me when I say that survivors’ guilt around HIV endures among older LGBTQ people. Why me, why not me. All of us who are here now, still, will have to grapple with this, in ways we have likely been skirting the edges of throughout. Why me (with/out a job), why me (with/out an infection), why me (with/out a home), why my loved one, why a stranger.

I will say what activists and scholars have said for decades now about HIV/AIDS: there is no moral message in a virus. Who gets it, who does not. Who dies, who does not. There is no morality here, no good or bad. There are odds and chances, near misses and sudden deaths. We have survived. Others have not. It is not because of what any of us individually did or did not do, although it is true that systems and policies failed many of us in profound ways. We did our best in a situation largely beyond our control, made choices within frameworks presented to us, frameworks that are uneven and unequal. We can spend the rest of our days shrinking ourselves down to fit into a place of guilt or we can find a way to grieve and live.

Today, I dropped off a piece of art at a local art center, for consideration as part of a show of community work that will go up in a local coffee shop, a collage I made in an online class I took through them this fall. I am wearing a t-shirt commemorating an online concert by one of my favorite bands, streamed in the early month of the pandemic as a fundraiser for the food banks in their home state. I am typing this on the new computer I had to buy when it became clear that my old computer would not rise to the needs of the situation when we were all online all the time. Next to me is the new phone I eventually caved and purchased once I accepted that no one got my texts on time and I was largely unintelligible on my old phone, which had become the way I connected even with my friends on the next block. Farther into this room is my child’s work desk, with a school-issued computer; the repurposed train table now covered with LEGOs; a stack of books waiting to be read by authors I’ve supported through online book talks; my trusty paper planner that’s filled largely with notes about when I cooked what so that we don’t go through all of this only to die of food poisoning in the end.

There is nowhere to rest my eyes that doesn’t reflect some adaptation to what we faced last year. The question is: what situation do we find ourselves in now? Not just where do we go from here, but how. Just yesterday I talked to a friend on the phone and we vowed to embrace each other’s weird, awkward, un/inhibited behaviors when we see each other again. That’s what I wish for all of us, as we emerge blinking into the light of 2021. The pandemic is not over yet, but we can start to learn a new way of living, together.

Day 13

This week has been rainy. We have still gone outside every day, but the lack of sunshine has exacerbated the depressive aspects of our family quarantine. I’ve been reading too much news too often for too long and it’s definitely negatively affecting my spirits. On the other hand, not regularly reading the news enhances my fear that I will miss something important and be blindsided by it when it’s too late to prepare. Usually that’s an unfounded anxiety I can reassure myself out of, but lately not so much.

Last night, my partner had to go into his office building to get his computer, as the work computer that lives at home crapped the bed, to use the 70s vernacular of our parents. On the one hand, only a handful of people have been in the entire building in the past 12 days and the computer has been locked in a closed room since then. On the other hand, just yesterday one of the people who works in my partner’s division reported that they are sick. The risk of an earlier transmission is small, as that person had already been out of the office for 3 days when the entire agency went to telework. Nonetheless, the abstract knowledge that unknown people around you are carrying the virus is qualitatively different from the concrete knowledge that specific people around you are carrying the virus. So. That was anxiety-inducing. Now we’re home again and I’ve logged the trip in my daily planner, which has been repurposed as a backward-looking record of our trips now that we have no planned events in the near future.

Looking out the window by my desk, I have a view of the most secluded corner of the garden, the little stretch of the back yard that is wedged in next to the basement stairs and bordered on three sides by fences. I converted it to a garden from scruffy grass about ten years ago by adding some shrubs along the border fence and various ferns and what have you. It’s a favorite spot for birds, with various places to land or perch and an ever-present leaf litter full of–I can only assume–delicious bugs and seeds. If I’m lucky, I can catch a hummingbird visiting the coral honeysuckle or the seasonal visit of the migrating Yellow-Bellied Sapsucker snacking in the dogwood. Thanks to a little bit of planning, there’s almost always something flowering to catch my eye.

It’s a beautiful spring out there. When the sun comes out we head out for our daily walks and it’s truly lovely. Flowering trees, all sorts of daffodils, the little clumps of spring bulbs that my neighbor brought back from Martha’s Vineyard so many decades ago now. Once it becomes even a bit less chilly than now, and the hibernating bees have all emerged and the overwintering eggs have all hatched, we will go out and clear up the stalks and sticks and spend some time with the dirt. Peace peace peace.

Day 4

I’m not going to lie, today was rough on me. Managing the flood of emails to read, attachments to print, photos to take and send, and an eager child who just wanted to be allowed to spend all day on the computer was a lot. The start of online / home school made the whole situation feel real in a way that it had only abstractly been this weekend. Anxiety is high. Existential dread is high. Desire to climb under the covers and stay there for the next six months is high.

During my less than desired six months curled under the covers today, aka afternoon quiet time, I really missed my grandmother. She passed away in December, just shy of her 93rd birthday; today I wished I could travel back in time to the comfort of her and the brusqueness with which her younger self would brush off any concerns about the state of the world that I could raise. She survived a lot by the time she was 30 and it took more than a recession or three to rattle her. This, though. I don’t know.

Today I inspected my garden, fairly neglected over the past few years but the native perennials are still thriving. It could use a lot of weeding, edging, dividing, and general attention. With nowhere to go and nothing to do, I’m hoping we can spend time together getting our hands dirty once it warms up for good. (In typical post-global-warming DC fashion, it’s going to be 80 on Thursday and Friday and then possibly snow on Sunday.)

For now, we will do some school projects, check out some websites, and just keep breathing. Tomorrow is another day to try to be better at explaining the transitive property than I was today.

Day 1

Today it felt like we shifted into a different phase in our household’s relationship to COVID-19. Maybe it was just that it was the first day where we were home and knew that the three of us would be here indefinitely, with my child out of school and my partner teleworking.

For the past two weeks, I’ve been fighting the urge to keep my child home from school, knowing the incubation period is when we all need to be socially isolating as much as possible. As a sociologist with anxiety, it’s been all too clear where this has been heading and I have struggled to feel safe in an environment where it’s abundantly clear that other people are not taking the risk seriously. Two weeks ago, my partner went around to all our regular stores and stocked up on the food items that we rely on. The one yogurt I can eat. The rice we eat twice daily. The unprocessed meats that don’t contain any allergens. (Harder than you’d think to find those unless you’re okay with just eating all plain chicken, all the time.) The cereals, breads, spreads, and snack foods that are allergen-free.

Then, last weekend, I went out again, replenishing what we’d consumed that week–more than most people who don’t have to prepare all meals and snacks at home–and adding to what we have to stretch our stores to 3 or 4 weeks of food. Besides my–hopefully unfounded–fear that the grocery production and distribution system will be disrupted and our safe foods won’t be available, I have another–probably less unfounded–fear that my chronic illness makes me more vulnerable to this virus, exacerbated my my inability to get a clear concrete answer on whether it does. The upshot is, we were not standing in any lines once Maryland finally announced that schools would be closing because I had been expecting this outcome since the first DC case appeared.

Not that being with each other around the clock, indefinitely, is something that anyone in our family is looking forward to. However, I’m most anxious in situations outside my control that are unpredictable. By closing schools and shifting to telework, the situation has become both more predictable and more inside my control. Obviously I can neither precisely predict the spread of the virus–although we are tracking Italy closely–nor can I control it. But I can now more easily control the choices our family makes, having been designated Official Team Leader in order to stave off chain-of-command bickering for the duration. And, I’m much less anxious during an actual crisis than during those periods when I’m trying to determine if it’s actually a crisis or when I think it’s a crisis but nobody else seems to be acting like it is, i.e. the last few weeks.

Now we all agree: this is a crisis. We should be socially isolating (yes, I believe “distancing” is insufficient because we’re always inclined toward the least restrictive interpretation). We should be prepared to be living this way for some time. We know that more illness and, sadly, increasing numbers of deaths are coming. I have my marching orders and I am following them. I have also identified like-minded friends with whom we’ll start limited socializing once we’ve all spent 14 days both essentially self-quarantined and symptom-free. Now that I have my family together under one roof, off the subway, and out of contact with people following god-only-knows-what guidelines for their behavior, I am as good as I’m going to be able to be during a global pandemic with a fascist president in an election year.

For me, today is day one. Day one of trying to establish routines and practices that will get us through this as sanely and healthily as possible. Not trying to replicate our school or work environments at home, but creating a home environment where we can work and learn. We cleared our personal belongings out of shared areas. We moved all the Legos off my child’s desk so it can be a workstation. We went for a walk and a bike ride through the park, keeping our distance from friends we saw along the way. We cooked, we did laundry. Tomorrow we’ll establish a work station for my partner, do more cleaning, have a family meeting and make a plan for the schedule of our days together.

Then we’ll do our best to just breathe.