In April 2020, I found myself too walloped by anxiety to write. The pandemic had shut down the world, and all I could muster were some musings about my own lack of inspiration. The musings were unfinished. I never published them.
Now it’s a year and a half later, and I found the musings recently when cleaning out files. Reading them is like opening a time capsule. I’m finally sharing them here today.
April 2020 was unlike any other time in history. We had a pandemic, but we also had the internet! For a moment, the world was unified in a way it never had been before, albeit unified by fear and uncertainty. We were caught so off guard that even the politicians were flat-footed at first, unsure how to spin this to their advantage. Our divisions blurred.
Back then, I felt like someone had picked up the whole world and shaken it, like a snow globe. In those first few weeks, we didn’t know which way was up or down. Now, with hindsight, it’s interesting to revisit.
April 2020
The magnitude of our current crisis makes me want to say something about it. But I’ve been struggling to find the words—struggling to write in general. My focus has been stolen.
“I feel helpless most of the day,” my friend wrote recently on Facebook. “I’m not a doctor. Or a first-responder. I’m told that my obligation to serve the public is to stay home.”
This helplessness has consumed me as well, and over the last few weeks, it has led to a dazed, listless despondence. I like to be a helper, but as an immunosuppressed person, it would be not only impractical but irresponsible for me to volunteer right now, for instance picking up groceries for neighbors or delivering meals with the local food bank. Staying in, watching others’ suffering unfold through my screens, makes my heart ache.
I keep pondering the strangeness of it all. The way we quarantine and sanitize our groceries and packages and mail. The knowing, bright-eyed smiles of many neighbors as we greet each other on walks, while stepping off sidewalks and crossing streets to give each other wide berths. We are all in this together, apart. We’re in our apartness together.
The structure of my life has changed in only small ways, and yet the changes affect me profoundly. I am still writing at home. Ron’s salary as a teacher is still the same. We are eating the same foods as before. But he is home now, beginning online teaching this week, in a little makeshift office on a card table in the sunroom.
We’re trying to get up and go to bed around the same times as before, but because he has no commute, there isn’t the same urgency to hauling ourselves out of bed or getting into bed with the same discipline as before. This loosening seemed good at first, but I’m finding that it adds to my listlessness. I feel like a marionette whose strings are too loose, and who thus has no structure, unable to quite stand upright, always slumping.
The edges of everything have become blurred. When will the crisis end? It’s unknown, the edge of it pushing forward into late April, May, maybe August, maybe even future years.
Meanwhile, when I look directly at what’s happening, the stress is often overwhelming. For the first week or two, I sat riveted to Facebook and online news, unable to tear myself away for more than an hour as the crisis unfolded. I feared getting sick myself, then I feared Ron getting sick and not being able to go to him in the hospital. Then I feared my parents getting sick, then shuddered to think of all the others whose parents are already sick and dying.
Then the stock market plummeted and new fears spiked: of recession, of cuts to education and Ron’s job, of the need to scramble for work and income and abandon my beloved writing projects. I lay awake for hours some nights. My most selfish fear, and yet one that doesn’t make me ashamed, is the fear of not finishing my books before I die. What if I become like Mr. Holland, always struggling to finish his opus while life gets in the way?
One thing is clear, I would always conclude: I should be working as hard as possible to finish my books as soon as possible, just in case. That thought made it all the more dismaying when I would go to the computer and be unable to focus.
That’s it. The piece ends there. I must not have had the wherewithal even to finish it!
But I’m glad I wrote it, capturing how my writing was going, or not going, at the beginning of this crisis.
Nowadays, in November 2021, I’m bizarrely missing that blurry, uncertain time. Not everything about it! Not the stress and heartache. But I do miss the silencing of the highways, and the way life slowed down. I miss the breathless conversations with neighbors, the time with Ron at home, our midday meals on the front porch.
I miss the camaraderie I felt with the stranger in the elevator.
It was early in the shutdown, and I had just arrived at my health clinic for an infusion of my immunosuppressive med. The clinic was eerily empty, with all non-essential appointments canceled. We weren’t wearing masks yet, but we were washing our hands and trying not to touch anything.
After I got on the elevator, a tall, young Black man got on too, and we politely stood on the floor Xs diagonally across from each other. Then he hit a button with his elbow, and as the doors closed, he glanced at me and we both cracked smiles.
“This is crazy,” he said.
“Isn’t it?!” I burst out.
“I mean, I’m pressing buttons with my elbows…” he said, and we both started laughing and shaking our heads.
I had been afraid to come here, especially with my immunosuppression, but our laughter broke the tension. I felt better. We bid each other farewell and good luck, still laughing over our shoulders.
Over the last few weeks, the shutdown has finally been ending for Ron and me. We’re both vaccinated and boosted, and we’ve begun spending time indoors and unmasked with vaccinated friends and family. It’s a relief, but I feel wistful too.
Last winter, I discovered that I loved gathering on our back patio in the cold, everyone bundled in blankets and jackets and sleeping bags, our breath forming clouds as we spoke. I loved the fresh air in my lungs, and the feeling of going through something together, something that softened us around the edges.
Lately I’ve been having another bout of writer’s block, the mirror image of what I felt at the beginning of the shutdown. I wonder if it’s due to the transition back to normalcy. Sometimes, lately, everything feels a bit meaningless. I catch myself wondering if what I’m doing really matters at all.
But reading that long-ago passage helps me. I think I am still a bit shell-shocked. It makes sense that after everything that’s happened, I would still be affected now.
Thankfully, I eventually regained my focus back then, and I’m sure I will this time too. I’ll keep crafting my books and blog posts. They are small contributions to the world, but they’re something, and they’re mine.
I wish you all the best in these strange and still-anxious times. Stay safe and healthy, hold your loved ones close, and enjoy the fresh winter air. Hang onto compassion, uncertainty, and blurred edges. Enjoy the slow, strange emergence into whatever our new normal will be. 🙂
