Words&Dirt

Greetings, dear friends of the present and curious citizens of the future.

It’s been almost two and a half years since the pandemic began, and most of the people I know have quit the “COVID dance.” We’re done sheltering in place, done with social distancing, done with masking, and we all got vaccinated and boosted. For roughly the last year, I have lived in a relatively normal fashion, doing things like going to concerts, taking vacations (including air travel), and occupying public spaces without a substantial fear of contracting the virus.

It’s been really, really nice. So nice, in fact, that most days I forget that the pandemic hasn’t ended. This is a good thing psychologically; it wouldn’t be healthy to maintain the levels of high anxiety that characterized my initial reaction to the pandemic, when facts were much murkier and vaccinations a mere possibility. But facts, as the saying goes, are stubborn things, and the fact remains that COVID continues to disrupt our lives in a variety of ways.

For me personally, these disruptions generally fall into a single category, which I’ll call something like “COVID prevents me from spending time with the people I love, especially if they live far away.” Particular instances include canceling our family’s annual summer party in 2021, having a concert in Portland canceled in late April of 2022, and then having a special event in Eugene for two of my best friends canceled just a couple weeks later.

And then last week, Jessie flew home from visiting her Dad in Spokane, WA, and brought something extra home with her. She started experiencing symptoms and tested positive less than a week away from the date we’d chosen for our 2022 summer party. A couple days after that, I got sick too. Our cases were both fairly mild and we were able to mitigate them with Paxlovid prescriptions, but the timing was terrible. We decided to postpone the party and plan to have it in a few weeks instead. It’s a better situation compared to last year, but still a major disappointment because some of our friends who planned to attend will now be unable to join us.

These events occupy a weird emotional space; I’m having a hard time figuring out how I should think and communicate about them, which is the main purpose of this Pandemic Journal. I’ll start with the obligatory statement that these are truly “first world” COVID problems. I haven’t had a single loved one die from the virus, and have escaped pretty much all of the serious traumas that COVID can cause. I’m incredibly lucky and grateful for this, and I don’t take it for granted.

Still, if I’ve learned anything from my journey into counseling psychology over the last couple years, it’s that minimizing your personal suffering by comparing it to the suffering of those who are “worse off” is an extremely common yet psychologically detrimental practice. Yes, in moments of calm reflection it absolutely makes sense to put our own troubles in perspective, but when we do this in a way that represses or delegitimizes our own feelings of pain and sadness, it can become a form of low-grade self-harm. So I just want to take a moment to acknowledge how much COVID has taken from us––not just loss of life or diminished physical health, but all the invisible, subtle wounds it has inflicted on our social fabric, our emotional connective tissue, our desire for togetherness that’s rooted in the deepest aspects of our nature as communal animals.

When it comes to these less obvious but pervasive injuries, there’s a special place in my heart for people whose worldviews do not permit grandiose narratives or dogmas that posit a “greater purpose” for human life beyond our basic desire to seek out and flourish alongside people who share our values and interests. For people like me and many of my friends and family members, there is nothing beyond or outside of our mortal incarnation in this single time and place. As Ta-Nehisi Coates aptly put it: “I have no God to hold me up. And I believe that when they shatter the body they shatter everything” (Between the World and Me, 113).

True communitarians live with a sense of “the body” that goes beyond the borders of our own skin, extending into the folds of nature that cradle and challenge us. Most importantly, this extended sense of embodiment generates what Milton Mayeroff calls “intelligibility” through co-participation in life with our “appropriate others”:

The intelligibility I am trying to suggest goes with feeling that we belong and are uniquely needed by something or someone, in contrast to the disquiet that comes with not quite fitting in anywhere and with continued and sometimes desperate attempts to find our place…Such intelligibility is not a once-and-for-all thing, but is a continuing function that goes with caring for my appropriate others…My world becomes intelligible for me through caring and being cared for, or, put differently, as I become responsible for the growth and actualization of others. In the sense in which intelligibility means being at home in the world, we are ultimately at home not through dominating or explaining or appreciating things, but through caring and being cared for. (On Caring, 91-2)

Insidiously, COVID cuts off access to many routes of “caring and being cared for.” And that can be incredibly hurtful, even to a person who is otherwise untouched or not seriously impacted by the virus itself. I’ve had a lot of fun this year, but I have also spent a lot of time grieving lost moments of connection, conversations cut short or denied, and hugs that would have been. And if you’re in a similar situation, I just want you to know that I feel your pain, and that pain is valid.

I believe we will be paying the socioemotional costs of COVID for at least a generation or two to come, which is one of the reasons I want to work in mental health. It’s going to take a monumental collective effort to cope with what’s happened and learn to live and grow together again in the wake of a world whose love potential was so stymied by this damned disease. We can do it. We must do it.

Until next time, be well, and good luck.

Global: 562,594,299 confirmed cases, 6,369,876 deaths

United States: 89,566,430 confirmed cases, 1,023,851 deaths

California: 10,436,723 confirmed cases, 92,903 deaths

Humboldt County: 20,057 confirmed cases, 151 deaths

Addendum––July 30th, 2022: As it turned out, COVID was not quite done with me when I originally published this pandemic journal. After about four days of feeling normal and engaging in all of my usual routines, my symptoms rebounded on the night of Thursday, 7/21. I then spent the next week being sick all over again. Tested negative the following Thursday, 7/28.