If I could choose one word to describe this pandemic, it would be “exhausting.”
Mental health to the physical – your spirit, happiness, health, friends, family, exercise, hobbies, etc – every aspect of life that is already so taxing and exhausting is made worse with the extra layers added on.
And of course life stops for no one so societal issues of racism and politics makes it even more exciting to navigate this space and find some sort of normalcy that does not exist.
The guilt? Forget about it. In every direction.
You don’t spend enough time with friends and family? You’re selfish. You’re an asshole. You don’t care about the people you love. You are judging the people you love by saying they are not safe enough to be around.
You spend time with friends and family? You’re selfish. You’re an asshole. You don’t care about the world and doing the right thing by keeping to your circles and being safe. You risk potentially affecting your friends and family but also everyone you interact with after spending time with friends and family.
There is no winning.
How do you tell your sister you love her but you don’t trust her lifestyle because she doesn’t wear masks? How do you tell your friends you miss them and want to hang out with them but you can’t because you know they’ve been traveling?
It feels very much like a losing battle. Time and time again. Making the “right” choice feels impossible because no matter what, in some way you will lose. So in the end you basically just have to make whatever choice you can in the moment and hope it all works out in the end. Crazy thing to leave to luck.
I don’t like the feeling of others lives in my hands. I don’t like that weight and it’s crushing me. Every choice I make. Every time I open up my mouth to set a boundary I feel like I’m crossing a line and offending someone. I am afraid.
I know this will never happen but I just wish we as a country could all be on the same page. It would definitely be a big help. As if the stress from this global pandemic isn’t enough we now have to learn to navigate the awkward space of setting boundaries within our lives from our loved ones to ourselves to our community and every single person we come in contact with.
It matters. All of it matters, and way, way too much. It’s exhausting. Just so exhausting.
Questions before a normal social interaction use to be:
- Who’s going to be there?
- What should I bring?
- What time should I be there?
- How should I dress?
- How long are we staying?
Now each social interaction has these same questions but also the following:
- How many people are going to be there?
- Is it indoor or outdoor?
- Will people be masked? (for indoors/outdoors)
- Is it okay if I am masked regardless? (for indoors/outdoors)
- What’s the weather like? Is it warm enough to spend most of the time outside?
- Are we going to hug people?
- Has anyone been traveling?
- Should we have people spending the night? Should we be spending the night?
- Where are we going? Is there outdoor seating?
As a couple, you have to navigate this space with yet another added layer because it’s not just about what you do. The person you live and share your life with, they have to have the same exact values or it doesn’t work. You can’t have one of you maskless and the other not because then what is the point? So before social interactions we have to deal with the following questions and holding each other accountable afterwards on if we kept to our word.
- Are we on the same page as far as safety measures?
- Are we both staying masked the whole time?
- Are we going to hold onto our words if an awkward situation arises or are we going to succumb to our anxieties?
These are things we never had to talk about or be on the same page about before. We could love those who we love and spend time with them without worrying about what they did in their own time.
After quarantining last year when we finally came back to our social lives we lived in a way that was pretty ‘normal.’ Our circles were based on who we loved and wanted to spend time with, not who we felt safe around.
It didn’t matter if we hadn’t seen someone for months and have no idea how they’ve been living their lives – if they were a friend or family member, they were in our circle. They were people we hugged, shared things with, and hung out with completely mask less. They were our normal.
We had get togethers that were small at first, then bigger. BBQs. Pool parties. Weekend trips with friends. We were in short – living normal happy (but in this scary new world) – ‘reckless’ lives. The fact that I purposely didn’t post pictures of certain things we did because it felt like something for me to be ashamed of should say it all. And as much as that didn’t sit right with me, I ignored it because normalcy was important. My mental health and sanity was important. Feeling like a normal human being, was important.
Until my parents got sick.
It was an ongoing fear for me since the beginning of the pandemic. My 67 year old parents who had underlying conditions – this pandemic means something different. It wasn’t just about the inconveniences and the loneliness and the fear – this disease could actually kill them, and it almost did.
My world came crashing down the day my parents got sick. At first we were hoping it was the flu or a cold, something common and normal. But then it got progressively worse. Each day I called to check in and each day my heart sank when the phone would ring a little longer than what I considered to be ‘normal.’ But for the most part, they were still ‘okay.’
But then we started to feel symptoms (specifically loss of smell) and in that moment we knew. My parents got tested shortly after and so did we. And we all came back positive.
When this happened I didn’t even have a second to process what it felt like to have COVID myself or the fear that came along with it because unlike what most people think, it doesn’t just effect the elderly. It kicked our butt too.
Fevers, cold sweat, aches, pain, not being able to eat due to complete loss of smell and taste. We felt all of this but on the surface, to everyone we were “fine” and recovering well because we didn’t want to worry anyone – rather it be our parents or our students and families who we interact with on a daily basis.
We needed to be strong. To be healthy. To show that everything was okay and no one should panic. But we did panic. Every second was panic. The phone calls, the emails, each one was harder than the last and I felt sicker and sicker with every person I told because I was riddled with guilt about the way I had been living.
There is no way to tell how we got COVID and if it was us who gave it to my parents or vice versa but the way we lived did not sit well with me in this setting. If I had been doing everything right and being safe, I could attribute this to a twist of fate. Something that just happens in life that is out of our control but because we were NOT being safe, the guilt from feeling like I could have caused this ate me up inside and traumatized me beyond belief.
My father is the strongest person I’ve ever met and during those days, he was not himself. He was weak. Moving felt like work. Breathing felt like work.
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Croton Harmon Music Academy 