All so surreal

 One of the things I was reflecting on while working out this morning is how surreal this whole experience has been. Still some mornings I wake up and before I'm fully awake, I've forgotten the pandemic, I wake up and briefly go "wait there's something I was dreading" and then I remember.

It's surreal watching the news, where small businesspeople who worked really hard for really long are set to lose everything, because of a lockdown, while at the same time, movie-shoots are going on in the same area, because they are deemed "essential." And where the well-connected and powerful get sick, but get prime-level treatment while other people just die...and where nursing homes have the pandemic slowly burning through them, and prisons.

And there's the promise of a vaccine on the horizon, but more and more it seems like the Second Coming. I danced when the news of high efficacy came out, but now the realization that it may be six more months - if then - before I can be vaccinated hits. Six more months of living like I have been, with very limited trips out, only seeing my mother through the tiny screen of my phone, only waving to people at church, no restaurants, no potlucks, no real celebrations. I also admit my growing cynicism has kicked in and I just assume the wealthy, powerful, and well-connected will jump themselves to the head of the line, well before someone like me, and even before people like grocery workers and nursing home workers who SHOULD be among the first to get it. (I would say I shouldn't be among the first; I COULD work from home as much as I loathe doing it. But I would like to get vaccinated eventually, maybe in the first wave of "regular citizens" given that I have some risk factors and am slightly older)

In some ways my day to day life - at least on weekends - is not that abnormal: I cook, I do the laundry, I knit, I watch old movies on TV. And while I don't go antiquing or to craft shops....well, if I pretend that it's either a "week I'm not doing that" or that I'm trying to economize by not shopping it feels more normal.

And yet, it isn't. I see the news of what's going on in other places - we're not QUITE overwhelmed yet, though North Texas has had to cut back a lot of things because of limited hospital capacity. And I don't like how all the talking heads keep saying "it's gonna get worse, brace yourself." Oh, I know it will, it's just...I am very good at dreading things and the regular reminders that it will be Worse later on play badly on my mind. 

But the surreality of it is striking. I stand at the kitchen sink and wash the pots and pans from cooking, and look out the window at the wall of my neighbor's house, like always. Or I come over here and sit in my office and work, ALMOST like always - no one comes to my office hours, like always, it's just that my office hours are through a camera/microphone on my computer instead of in person. 

Christmas is going to be weird. That's where some of my dread latches on to now: how will I get through what was once the most important "family" holiday for me, when I cannot be with any family? And of course there's the added terrible frisson of having lost my dad last year; the jerkball part of my brain keeps going to the "well, this is practice for how you'll have to do it after your mom is gone" way of thinking, with a side of berating myself for not being a better "picker" when I was younger and not having a family of my OWN now. 

I mean, yes, I also know in a non-pandemic year, solo Christmas would be different because it would not be so solo; I would probably get invited to people's houses for at least a few hours here and there, and also I could run around to antiques stores and the like in the days before to distract myself. And there'd be more stuff at church - we are still holding services, but in a very limited way, and there are no Christmas parties this year. 

And I wonder: is this, in some way, what WWII Christmases were like? Where gas rationing meant many people didn't travel (and probably fewer people traveled far than do now anyway) and where families were often separated because the sons (and in some cases, even the daughters, and the fathers) were in service? And maybe other rationing limited things somewhat? I know in my mother's family growing up Christmases were MUCH simpler because they didn't have money, and I think once she and my dad had us they put on an effort to have big and good Christmases for us, because they didn't get them themselves. (My father used to talk about how it was a big deal to get an orange or a banana in your Christmas stocking)

It is strange living through what I guess is an historic event. And yet, this is different from many. I was not around for Kennedy's assassination (well, around for neither of them, though JFK seems to be the big watershed moment) but I was for September 11, and as horrible and shocking as that day was....a few weeks later and my life was largely back to normal. (Well, as normal as it ever is - that was the fall I bought the house, in fact, bought it two days after the attack, and I spent many evenings that fall over there, scraping and painting and also slowly moving "nonessentials" over from my apartment until everything was ready to move all my furniture). 

But this is slow-motion, in a way: like I said, I remember February 29 and saying to myself "you better stock up on tp and canned goods, it's possible this is going to get bad" and I also remember in January hearing about "some new virus showing up in China" and thinking "oh, this is going to be like SARS again" but while that was also a coronavirus, this current virus has some different properties (e.g., more readily spread by people who are not yet symptomatic) and also I think maybe there were slower responses on ALL sides in this that allowed the little fire to become a giant conflagration. And so we've all had to sit and watch a slow-motion tragedy that builds and builds, and that is just weird and hard (for me at least) to comprehend.

And yet, in some ways, losing my dad last year - even though I really wasn't "through enough" the grieving to be able to be so resilient during the pandemic as I might - has taught me some things about coping with it:

- Some days will just be bad days. I've been clumsy again, or sat down at the piano and played horrifically badly, and then worried that something had gone wrong with my brain, and then it's better a few days later.

- There are weirdly normal times in all this. That's the surreal thing; I will get involved with something and the news of the world will recede until I either see the news or stop and think about it, and again it will strike me as how odd it is that inside my house at least, things are mostly normal, when things going on in the wider world are deeply abnormal.

- You just keep going because all you can do is hope that better times are coming

I will say one thing that has been markedly worse in this than losing my dad was? EVERYONE is worried and scared and yes, maybe traumatized. When I lost my dad other people around me were doing OK, and it helped to see other people leading "normal" lives, and also they could help support me and even little things like hugs were possible. Now everyone is sad and scared and freaked out and I admit I've concealed how I've felt and how I've been while at work and also at church because...If I go to my department chair and say I'm struggling, I almost feel like the undercurrent of the response I will get will be "Everyone is, just deal with it." I opined the other day that there have been days in this I've been tempted to go in and float the idea of resigning, because I am sick of teaching in this sort of weird netherworld where you are half online and half in person, and where students apparently expect me to troubleshoot their computer issues, or write exams that are "phone friendly" even though they were explicitly told they needed a reliable laptop or desktop for classes this fall. And it's just taken away most of the joy I once had in teaching, and magnified the things I dislike. But I suspect I'd not get a lot of sympathy, and I suspect my chair has it worse. And that's very isolating, to know you are hurting but also to know other people probably have it worse, so your going to seek support would mean you'd add to someone else's burden.

But it's terrible and isolating to realize there's no one you can really go to for help or comisseration, because everyone is in the same problems. And there's been a lot of sniping online about who has it worse, and yes, I acknowledge that in many ways I have it better than many - but that does not take the fact away that I am alone, that some weeks this summer literally the only person I spoke to was my mother over the phone, that I have no one to bounce things off of (so when students make requests that seem extreme, I am more prone to cave, because I don't have a colleague around me to go "no, that's kind of ridiculous they are asking that")

And it's hard to find a lot of joy, some days, when my joy used to be in interactions with students, or just hanging around with people from church, or going antiquing or to the JoAnn's or some such. I mostly now shuttle between work and home, with weekly detours to church and the grocery store. And I suppose really, that's how most of my direct ancestors mostly lived for most of the time - either in small towns or on remote farms depending on who it was. And again, I feel like: who am I to feel bad about these new restrictions? This is how most people live. 

I had someone counsel me to take some time each day to meditate but the secret is? If I try to do that, I more often wind up ruminating or staring into the abyss, so instead I try to keep busy so I don't think about how strange and different everything is, and not to let myself think, "What if it is never different from this; what if it never goes back to more like it was before?" because I can't quite wrap my brain around the idea that maybe I traveled for the last time, or ate in a restaurant for the last time, or felt comfortable walking through a grocery store slowly for the last time. Oh, I know there will BE "last times" for all these things, but I kind of expected them to come....later in my life. Like, a lot later. 

It's all just strange and I don't know if other people are like me or not but trying to make sense of it breaks my brain.