An und für sich

The pandemic — which isn’t over, by the way!

Once in grad school, Anthony Paul Smith and I had the same temp job. It was a terrible job, doing tedious data entry to convert the Sunday circular coupons into a clickable webpage. Seldom has a temp job felt more purely pointless and degrading. And yet, a few months later, we caught ourselves fondly recalling those times, and Anthony suggested that we need to resist the urge to be nostalgic for something simply because it’s in the past.

I find myself thinking that about the pandemic lately. I am finally having a calm summer vacation at home, and especially now that My Esteemed Partner usually works from home, our routine is reminiscent of the pandemic. We followed stricter guidelines than most, for longer than most. For me, the “lockdown” lasted a year and a half, and even when I returned to teaching, our social life was very constricted.

I am a relatively healthy person, so I wasn’t especially worried about catching the novel coronavirus myself. It was more a matter of not wanting to accidentally harm others, since My Esteemed Partner was potentially more vulnerable, and I live in a building full of elderly people. The effect was much the same, though — the instinctive fear and avoidance of other people, who could all be a disease vector, the preference to huddle at home whenever possible. I remember once, the first pandemic summer, My Esteemed Partner wondered aloud if we could get a rental somewhere in Michigan, so that we could get out of the city but still be isolated. I always have some degree of travel anxiety, but this time around I was straight-up afraid — not just of the travel itself, but specifically of traveling to a place full of covid scofflaws. (Eventually, right-wing militants in Michigan would be arrested for plotting to kidnap the governor over covid restrictions.)

As I’ve written before, we had ideal circumstances — we lived in a very covid-compliant area, we both kept our jobs, we didn’t have childcare to worry about, and we even came out financially ahead. Ultimately we bought an apartment, something we wouldn’t have seen as a possibility just a couple years earlier. But I can tell it has lingering effects. My emotional equilibrium still feels “off.” I have less resilience, and I feel like my moods swing more than they should. Above all, my social muscles feel like they have atrophied. I have a friend who recently moved back to town, who has invited me out for last-minute drinks a few times, like back in grad school. I almost always turn him down, and though I can always think of some particular excuse, I am realizing that part of the problem is that I simply need more lead-time to build up my reserves and face a social situation.

Part of the issue is that I was never truly alone for any considerable amount of time. I know others who were single when the pandemic began who are dealing with a whole other level of difficulty, so I’m grateful that My Esteemed Partner was with me. Yet solitude has been a major part of my emotional equilibrium since I was a very young child, and I have been largely deprived of it for years. During the pandemic, my only time alone in the apartment would be when My Esteemed Partner was walking the dog. Eventually, doctors appointments or haircuts would provide longer windows. But I have had maybe 2-3 instance in the past few years where I had the house to myself for the better part of a working day, and that makes it hard for me to recenter. Thankfully My Esteemed Partner is doing a couple days in the office most weeks now, which seems to be helping.

Of course, I didn’t do myself a lot of favors with the transition to normal life. When I went back to teaching, I was so excited to be in-person again that I accepted a hugely undercompensated teaching overload — teaching more than I’d ever taught before in my life, two semesters in a row, complete with an extreme early-morning schedule. And this past year, I took on a faculty governance role that proved more time-consuming and otherwise stressful than I had anticipated. In other words, work has objectively been more stressful and demanding, so we would expect that my social and emotional resilience would be down from historic levels. And yet I feel like I was starting from a weaker baseline. These past couple years would have been hard no matter what, but would they have been this hard?

And ultimately, of course, I did get covid, and I did give it to My Esteemed Partner. We both had a very mild case, and she recovered faster than me. My main concern was not the physical discomfort, but rather the isolation. I also technically had long covid — though it manifested only in a persistent cough and a strange rash (verified by an actual doctor as a post-covid symptom!), rather than the scary symptoms we all picture when that dreaded, mysterious condition comes up.

None of this is to say that the disease isn’t serious for others, nor that we shouldn’t have taken more or different precautions as a society. I’m just suggesting that for me, and probably for many, the most enduring post-covid effects are due to the isolation itself rather than the disease.

And I wish that our public sphere were not structured so that bringing up those concerns automatically triggers the reaction of “OH! so you wish the elderly and immune-compromised would just die for your convenience, huh?!” No, I don’t. I sacrificed a not-inconsiderable percentage of my life to try to avoid harming others — primarily My Esteemed Partner, but also many people I barely know or have never met. That imposed a cost on me that is very real and that I am still dealing with. And it still seems like every day on social media I see a stray remark implying that “lockdowns never happened” or social isolation is easy and fun. Even the repeated refrain that “the pandemic isn’t over, by the way!” grates, because it seems to carry with it the assumption that we should return to that level of anxiety and restriction.

What is the point of this post? I’m not sure. Ultimately, this is my blog and I sometimes blog about personal things. If there’s a political point here, it might be the suggestion that maybe liberals don’t need to add a constant reminder of that terrible pandemic that ruined all our lives to their litany of smug truisms and that maybe it doesn’t need to be an article of faith that the side-effects of all pandemic restrictions are either non-existent or by definition swamped by their life-saving intentions. In any case, not seeing constant reminders of the pandemic or implicit accusations that I’m a bad person for feeling bad in its wake would help my mental health.