Set Me Free
Is today Miday or Wursday or is it Tunday or Frednesday?
This COVID-19 is confusing the heck out of me. I’m losing my sense of time and place and meaning. It’s taken me out of the driver’s seat and I sometimes I feel like I don’t know my own name.
Today, I have no smarmy things to say about the virus. No funny moments. No sarcasm. No glibness. Nothing remotely good. I am sick of it.
The giant black spider has been around way too long. It came so utterly without warning while it takes young, it takes old, it takes people with disabilities and those who are otherwise perfectly able. It takes white, it takes black, brown and yellow, it take French and Asians and it takes Americans, from sea to shining sea.
It imprisons young cancer patients and keeps new parents from seeing their premature newborn babies. It has no heart and it sucks.
I wrote yesterday about parallels between the Stockholm Syndrome and how people are coping with the virus. The evil, ugly beast has taken over my life. I am coping by trying to see the positive side of COVID-19. It is a stretch but that is what the Stockholm Syndrome is about, grasping on to something remotely less horrible and using it as a coping mechanism.
When I speak to people and always ask how they are doing, the answers are usually “pretty good,” “hanging in there” or “OK so far.” I might respond in kind and note that at least I am healthy “god willing.” It’s part of the Stockholm Syndrome. Convince yourself you’re holding up and it’s a bit easier not to go mad.
But there will come a tipping point when the responses will change. It’s already here in our private moments but like an overflowing sewer it will soon color our connections with the world.
It is already showing in the hordes who carry assault rifles and demand the country open up again. It is showing in the right wing madness that permeates so many people’s brains. The message is out that it’s time to end the quarantines and let people live again. Damn the future and damn science.
I will say that while I am lucky not to be physically affected, my emotional state is in the dumps. I am a prisoner. and like the prison inmate I wonder how I can escape this with my sanity. Or will I always carry with me this wound against my fleeting freedom.
Perhaps, I should take an on-line course and get my law degree. But even if I am a model prisoner, it won’t effect my sentence. That is out of anybody’s hands.
And those I speak with, will eventually come back with “rotten,” “at the end of my rope,” “worse than ever” and “I’m mad as hell and I can’t take it any more.”
Unfortunately, there is no place to channel such anger. You can try yelling at the government or the priests or the rabbis or the scientists. But COVID-19 follows its own path, in its own time, regardless of what we may want.
Even a beautiful, summer-like day doesn’t do the trick. It’s like having cancer and trying to ignore the 600-pound elephant and talk about lilacs blooming.
So what are we to do?
In the concentration camps, some people went mad and took their own lives. Others somehow were able to get past the animal cruelty they saw every day and somehow to live. The survivors dug down and found something to hold on to.
We’re not in concentration camps but our freedom to move has been taken and we have to watch while our brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers are dying.
My answer is to accept that there are bad days and they will pass. And there are good days. That isn’t to deny reality but it can be a tiny bit easier to get by knowing that like anything else, this too shall pass, I think.