We’re living through a pandemic—and not just a pandemic, but a profoundly mismanaged one, wherein the same set of national dysfunctions that led to Donald Trump being elected president are magnified on a global scale by a refusal to execute a coherent national strategy to end it. So now, despite having some of the world’s top experts in virology, pandemics, and crisis response, such that we should have been leading the world on this, we are a global embarrassment, with a problem so outsized relative to our population that adversaries and allies alike are shocked. To top it off, we’re as split on this topic as everything else: half the country feels humiliated and aghast, desperate to make whatever sacrifices are needed to end this thing, while the other half embraces defiance and denial in the name of some distorted version of liberty.
Mortification is an apt word here. Because levels of mort.
Pandemic bad days are wars with myself, chaos in my thought patterns, and a sick stone just under my ribcage. Bad pandemic days have no sense of humor. Because, really: none of this is funny. All of this is deadly.
All of this and its informational, socioeconomic, and visceral reverberations have become part of the background in which we live. And as Americans are learning later than most, living in a pandemic means that even as we are reminded constantly of a potentially lethal threat surrounding us, we are expected to continue living and working as if things were normal. But it’s not normal to have no choice but to work at home, every single day. Going to my office involves a complicated protocol. Next week I will be tested in order to enter a two-week quarantine before I will be allowed to step foot on campus. Yesterday I spent an hour and a half wading through a course I’m required to take online in order to be greenlighted for reentry. Emails are coming through constantly from administrators, letting us know what we’re expecting (and expected to do) in a constantly changing context. And this is not even getting into the firehose of pandemic-related news on Twitter and in the media.
Everyone has their bad pandemic days, and I have mine.
I know; my reality is relatively easy. I’m not also trying to homeschool and safely entertain children while working full time. No one close to me has died. Both my parents are healthy. I’m not managing angry or depressed teenagers or an abusive spouse. (I’m mostly not abusing my own spouse.) I have the luxury of a job with health insurance and the flexibility to work at home. Unlike two of my friends, I’m not managing disorganized nursing homes with precious parents in them. I know that the new normal is worse for many, many of my fellow citizens.
But my bad pandemic days are still bad in their own ways. The background noise of a nation in real, not just hyperbolic crisis swells into a distraction so loud I can’t think. Or all I can think is dark thoughts: this country is unraveling; the guy at the top has massive cognitive and moral deficits which warp everything around him; the economy has a real chance of not recovering if we can’t get this under control. If it fails, the nations who have sacrificed so much to rein in their own outbreaks, sometimes with way fewer resources available to them, will be unfairly affected. Everything, every other crisis that has been radically exacerbated under this toxic administration hinges on an election in less than three months. The thought of the Democrats losing in this particular election–or having it stolen by bad actors–scares me more than any election in my lifetime. Meanwhile, the exponentially larger threat of climate crisis looms all around us, and everyone has tuned it out in the face of the moment.
Bad pandemic days make every task feel meaningless. What is the point? Why put all this energy into redesigning my class when students are going to be disappointed and tuned out, exhausted from too much online “learning” already. Or: there’s no way to translate this without drastically whittling it down. (But maybe, I muse, this rare chance to whittle it back down to the skeleton, with no real ramifications, is useful; I can slowly build back.) If I whittle it down, though, do I lower my standards in a way that is unfair to subsequent cohorts of students? Meanwhile, there is technology that I haven’t yet learned, new parameters for doing things that I haven’t mastered. And with what time?
How in the hell will I teach 80 students in a space that is not a room with our bodies in it? How do I deliver challenging material when it’s already hard to focus, in a medium that makes it harder?
Bad pandemic days are a voice in my head that says, I just need to lie down. I want to sleep until this is over. Sleep will tune it out. But that voice competes with its opposite: Just look at Twitter for five minutes, see what’s happening with that Russia thing? Maybe if we just glanced over the Covid tracking website, see where the deaths are today. Check the NYT home page. Did any emails come in? And then the superego: What are you doing? God, you have no discipline. You’re never going to get this shit done when you’re so easily distracted. The child says: We’re not even allowed to be distracted by a pandemic, when 170,000 have died? Is “productivity” the only fucking thing we care about?
Pandemic bad days are wars with myself, chaos in my thought patterns, and a sick stone just under my ribcage. Bad pandemic days have no sense of humor. Because, really: none of this is funny. All of this is deadly. We are a sick society; we were before this, and we will be even worse after if we don’t handle it. Bad pandemic days I want to quit academia, quit even trying to write, because seriously, who fucking cares? Join some part of a revolution and do something useful, for fuck’s sake. (I cuss even more than usual.)
[Trigger warning: dark thoughts expressed for the purpose of expelling them.] On the worst days, the pandemic piles onto a feeling I get on the worst climate change days, when I become suddenly, deafeningly clear that I don’t want to live through what’s coming. I don’t want to be here to witness how bad the suffering is going to get. Even now, I see a video of livestock animals being swept away in recent floods in Kansas and I think I will implode from anguish. I don’t want to be here to watch it get much, much worse. And that’s a thought with a terrifying methods question behind it: How will I take care of that? Maybe you need a plan, some gentle or abrupt way to exit. The truth is, I’m not brave enough to get that real with it, except in jest, with friends who can handle dark humor. Still, even contemplating it—suicide for the coward too overwhelmed with empathy for suffering to bear ongoing witness—leaves me gutted, flat with despair.
Bad pandemic days feel indulgent, too, so I find I can’t really just give up and lean into them. Because people are actually dying right this minute! In painful ways, in isolation from loved ones! And caregivers, doctors, janitors, other essential workers (who we generally don’t pay like we believed that) are exhausted. There is a real world in which my showing up does matter. I can make a difference in that place, like so many of my colleagues have done, in good faith. And there’s a lot to do in that world, and plenty I’m behind on. So this bad day is a waste of time.
But sometimes they get me anyway. And my best shot at the end of a bad pandemic day is to commit to cultivating better thoughts and wrangling better behavior tomorrow. And being patient with myself, because all of this is understandable.
One thread that actually helped me on this front today, by Sarah Noll Wilson: