My dad died of flu complications 2 years ago. Coronavirus anxiety has been hell.
“Well, your father did die of the flu, after all,” my mother said over dinner. This was a few weeks ago, in early March. We were out to dinner for my boyfriend’s birthday, the last time we ate out since the US spiralled into collective panic, and probably the last time we’ll eat out for the foreseeable future.
This sent me reeling. My father died of a heart condition, I thought. His heart failed, causing him to crash his car.
He hadn’t been well before that, though. Not for a few months. I went back through the chain of events in my mind, back to cancelling a vacation we’d had planned for a year because of his health, and realized that he’d caught the flu around March, just before his birthday, a flu that evolved into pneumonia, which became something that lingered around him for months. He was older, too, 67, and his job was difficult and demanding; he was a hematologist and pathologist, the director of clinical laboratories at a major hospital network in Pennsylvania, and he refused to take a step back. He couldn’t.
The illnesses were the dominoes; the stress of his work, and his inability to take a break, knocked them all down.
The COVID-19 pandemic has taken an intense emotional toll on me, and of course I’m not unique in this; everyone, everywhere, is feeling some level of psychological impact, in a number of different ways. For me, the nature of the virus itself has been deeply triggering. An antigen that attacks the lungs and heart. After my mom’s comment at dinner, I began to feel a steady, constant sense of terror; it had suddenly occurred to me that I could lose just about anyone in my life in the same way that I’d lost my father.
Fear is swift and efficient, working quickly to fill you up so fast that you don’t have a chance to breathe through it. Over the course of just a few days, what started as an incessant- yet low- hum evolved into a deafening, consuming anxiety. I couldn’t feel anything but cortisol. My mind was no more than a jumble of circular, terrified thoughts and I couldn’t see through my worst-case fears for the future.
Fear is also incredibly difficult to challenge, as there are always uncomfortable truths that come up for us when we ask fear where it’s coming from. I didn’t want to address why I was so triggered, so I did what so many of us are conditioned to do: compartmentalize. Ignore. Repress, and most importantly, run. In a culture where there’s always something to distract with- your main hustle and your side hustle and your side side hustle, the latest must-watch TV series or buzzy podcast, a perfectly spiritual, 30-step long morning routine, a social calendar filled to the max and then some- that’s an easy thing to accomplish in the short-term.
Emphasis on short-term. All forms of repression and escapism are bandaids for bullet wounds. If left unchecked, fear, an invasive species, grows exponentially and without compassion, and before we know it, it’s taken up so much of our insides that it has to break free. This looks different for different people; some experience angry outbursts, others panic attacks, self-destructive behavior, and so on and so forth.
What COVID-19 has done, however, is made all distraction via doing a lot more difficult. Those who can are working from their couches and kitchen tables. Every industry has been disrupted, many even coming to a halt. Events, from work functions to weddings to children’s birthdays, have been cancelled. People are quarantined away from family and friends, some with partners and some without. Only “essential” places are open. Cities look like ghost towns.
The world always keeps spinning, although for the first time in living history, it feels like it’s sort of come to a halt. This makes running from the fear really, really hard to do.
Pandemics apparently provide a lot of free time, but that free time comes with very literal, government-mandated restrictions, and if you’re smart, respectful of public health, and have the privilege to, the bulk of that time will be limited to your home. I’m someone who craves alone time and values the careful, intentional art of taking one’s time, but in a moment where the world seems to be asking us to slow down, I was completely rejecting it.
I didn’t want to write at all, or even just sit and draw; I was scared to do anything that might lead me to really feel the full weight of my emotions. It all seemed too intense. My frantic attention would float between work and social media as I attempted to simply drown out the terrified, restless chatter in my mind. I was also treating the news like an IV, and as you can imagine, that only made the anxiety worse. Fear seeks fuel. There were no boundaries and I was on round-the-clock high alert, something that’s especially unsettling if you have nothing to do (or, rather, have things you could do but are actively trying to not do them, like I was) and nowhere to go.
Mental health and I have a fraught history: eating disorders, chronic depression, PTSD, and depersonalization dissociative disorder. Thanks to a lot of self work, and a great therapist, I’m stable, healthy, and happy, and the tools I employ to manage mental health as best I can are necessary for maintaining that balance. But these practices, like journaling and meditation, all generally demand I do something I absolutely was not wanting to do. Feel my feelings.
Again, fear expands, and it needs somewhere to go. We can either release it ourselves or it’ll find a way to spill over on its own. Almost as quickly as it began, I was having panicky, paralyzing anxiety attacks. Melting down, crying and shaking, or effectively shutting off, completely avoidant and unresponsive. I was starting to feel it in my body, too. A painful tightness in my chest and jaw, aching up and down my spine.
My father’s birthday was March 18th. He would have been sixty-nine. We had to go to the grocery store that day, and while there, I dissociated. Badly. The worst episode I’ve had in a long time, the experience of which is something like having to watch your life happen without you. You’re locked away, trapped in a cage or a bubble, while your body continues on. Or a sad version of Peter Pan, trying to catch your shadow, but the reunion of mind and body is unpleasant; upon arrival, they clash, and the anxiety doesn’t just spill. It explodes.
“He would know what to do,” I told my boyfriend as I broke down, mid-walk home. My dad, he would know what’s happening. He would have all of the answers.
If he were alive, he’d be working around the clock to process COVID-19 tests. Since news of the illness first broke, when it was still halfway around the world, I’ve been wishing I could ask him about it.
He isn’t, though, and a major reason for that is because he wouldn’t slow down. It wasn’t traditional workaholism; although he wanted to retire, security fears kept him chained to a high-stress position and long hours. He wanted us to be okay. He wanted our mother to be okay. Ultimately, though, those fears took him from us. Life is weird.
While the character of coronavirus- what it does to a body and how deadly it is for those with pre-existing conditions- was the initial trigger, I realized then the depth of my emotional response. I’m frightened that I may lose more people I love in a way that feels all too familiar.
The most important piece of that is the what-if. What if I lose them? What if I’m the one who infects someone else and their loved one has to experience what I did? Wrestling with uncertainty is never easy, but it’s easier when we have all of our distractions and means of control at our disposal. Far more difficult when there’s, you know, a pandemic.
We’re also in a moment of history that is completely unprecedented; everything is a what-if. Any sense of control is few and fleeting and generally nonexistent.
This uncertainty doesn’t only apply to things outside of us; we distract as a means to avoid the unknowns in our inner worlds, particularly the pieces of our psyches that live in the shadows. The things that are the hardest to confront. What we fail to realize is that in this lack of confrontation, we give our shadows all of the power. Terrified of what we may find if we turn on the lights, we cash in our freedom. Ignorance is bliss, I guess, though it always, always keeps us small.
Fear of the unknown. It sounds like such a simple thing to have to realize, I know. We’re all grappling with the unknown. Both my feelings nor my desire to not feel them have been unique to me. People all around the world are trying their best to fill a to-do list to the brim in an effort to sweep emotion under the rug, a desperate game of if-I-can’t-see-them-they-can’t-see-me.
I’m not saying COVID-19, or anything objectively bad, is “meant” to happen. Not at all. The sentiment is infuriating. Bad is subjective, sure, but when someone tells you how holy or aligned something is in the midst of intimate tragedy, you want to rip their heads off. When we’re able to zoom out, though, there is some kind of lesson or learning in everything, so long as we accept how little we ever really know.
The tragedy is the event, not the art. The event just happens. Not to or of us, it just is. Art is the translation of whatever knowledge comes with it.
All this to say, although the experience hasn’t exactly been fun or easy, the mirrors that this event has held to both the life and loss of my father have also revealed the medicine in it. Would he have lived if he’d accepted the invitation to slow down?
Another what if, sure, but I believe a different sort of question, one that encourages growth. It’s said that unlearned history is doomed to repeat itself, and I would argue that learning, in its most basic sense, is only the first step to true understanding. Questioning history is how we then break patterns and expand. It’s how we unlearn whatever internalized beliefs are limiting us. Why could he not let go, just a bit? Why couldn’t he be okay with just a fraction less control? Sheer will has its place, but is no way to live indefinitely.
I’m doing as okay as I probably can be right now, which, of course, is very much a day-to-day thing, just like everything else. One second I’m completely fine, the next I’m a teary mess, the difference now being that I’m letting myself cry when I need to. Even if the emotion makes no intellectual sense, I let it run it’s course. Our emotional and mental worlds are not one and the same.
Uncertainty reminds us that every plan has an asterisk at the end, schedule may be subject to change.* We’re here and then we’re not and while we’re all grieving our sense of normalcy, and even the most mundane elements of what was formerly our average, everyday life, maybe we treat this great unknown as a great frontier. Instead of going outward, we go inward. We feel we’re missing out on everything, but many of us already were. We miss far more when a life is lived only on the surface, where one lives and breathes and dies by diversion.
I’m not at all preaching any sort of “enlightenment” or transcendence of the human experience, a concept I’m allergic to. To me, it’s just more escapism, and actually, I mean quite the opposite. When we go inward, we’re able to feel the depth of our humanness. We get to know ourselves in a way that enhances every experience life has to offer. Colors are brighter. Touch is warmer.
Another note: there’s a lot of messaging on social media to use this time to dive into personal projects, particularly creative ones. If that’s what you’re drawn to right now, great, but you don’t have to come out of quarantine with the next great American novel. Maybe, if you have the time and resources to be at home, even question and reimagine whatever it is you believe you “need” to do. Forget about who you have to be or want to be or think you should be. Just be. If you don’t know how to just be, there’s no better a moment than now to learn.
This is longer than I wanted it to be, or rather thought it was going to be. I guess that’s how it goes. I don’t really have any answers, although when we ask the right questions, we never really do. It’s okay to feel your feelings. In fact, it’s encouraged.
