Three (plus) years on

 This came across my Bluesky feed today, and first I thought it was a new article, as I'd not read it before: 

What are we to do with all this grief? by Emily L. Hauser

As it turns out, it was written in 2020 (in fact - she references "if Biden is elected" in the piece, so, before November 2020....). But in her post on Bluesky, she noted that she still remembers, that she remembers days in 2020 where she would wake up crying before she was fully awake because of all that was happening.

My experience was maybe a bit different? I remember waking up and feeling okay, and then suddenly what I was living through would pop up in my memory and I'd be like "Oh. Not going to campus today, going to have to set up my laptop and record more lectures" (if it was spring semester) or "need to remember to have a new mask and take my hand sanitizer" (If it was fall semester).

And I masked fairly late. My memory is faulty but I think I masked until fall 2022. Every time I thought I could drop it before then - once the vaccine was out - there was a new variant that made me think "no, my students are all commuters, some work in places where they might get exposed, some have small children or vulnerable relatives at home" and I continued to mask. 

But yes. The sadness, I still carry it with me. Some days are better than others but once in a while I get a bad one, where I remember how I essentially lost 2 years of my life to hiding out at home. (And I still haven't considered going to a play or a movie again; I might do an outdoor one but indoors? Not yet, especially considering there's apparently a new wave starting). It took me a LONG time to be comfortable going back to a restaurant and still I don't go in ones that are crowded or seem to have poor air circulation.

I think though that what I mourn now are more intangible things. The pandemic hit at a bad time for me - mourning my father, mourning more than one friend (! 2019 was a bad year), going through menopause which announced itself with a 'surprise' issue that almost sent me in for some invasive testing until bloodwork revealed that things were pretty much just normal, dealing with some hang over disillusionment from the budget failure on my campus and a couple instances of students turning out not to be honorable people....so my brain had a lot to chew on, and then suddenly, I was alone. Like ALONE alone. Church shut down in March and while there were recorded messages, and I was able to watch the live stream from the church in Illinois I had belonged to when I lived there, it was NOT THE SAME.

I think back now and am amazed at how I just....did the communion thing at home, usually with a bit of corn tortilla (they keep better than bread does in this climate) and either water or juice and I did it even though it felt wrong in a lot of ways, still, I sat there before the computer screen listening to the minister saying the familiar words and even though I was ALONE and in some cases it wasn't even a live broadcast, so i really was alone, I did it.

(And to this day, we use the prepackaged/presealed things, which we started using when we started meeting again in fall 2020 - distanced and masked except for communion. Part of it is ease - no need to keep track of bottles of juice and cups and boxes of bread, and no need to have a rota of women to come in Saturday morning and prepare it. I do hope we go back to the "old" way some time; my mother's church has)

And there was no "oh I want this thing to eat, let me run quickly to Pruett's and get it" - I took the dictum of "only shop every week or 10 days" far too seriously and often wound up doing without because it wasn't "time" to shop yet. 

Being a rule follower, as I am, hurt me in those times. I hear the "recommendations" made, which are maybe 30% harsher than they need to be to account for people being lax, and I try to comply with them to the letter. I've always been like that. I am not good at rebelling, and I do tend to defer to people I regard as "experts" more than I should. (And one thing I learned in this is how wrong some "experts" were). 

I remember spending Thanksgiving 2020 alone, eating a not-very-good lobster macaroni and cheese I paid way too much to have shipped to me on ice. And spent Christmas 2020 alone - there was an abbreviated Christmas Eve service and I went to it, the main thing I remember is I volunteered to help light candles, and I got yelled at for doing it 'wrong' by someone even though they should have known that I never did it before AND ALSO they gave me no guidance. But sadly, that's the main thing I remember.  

I also remember thinking, as I sat at home on Christmas Day: "Well, this is what it'll be like once your mom is gone. What an idiot you were to not be more social and maybe wind up married and with kids, single people have no way to celebrate holidays like this."

And I admit, during the "alone times" of the pandemic, I spent a lot of time pre-mourning that stage of my life - my mom gone, my brother and his family too distant (in ways more than geography) for me to be able to travel there, then what do I do? I don't have a lot of local friends, and most of them have grown kids they go to spend holidays with? And the thought of "oh just go serve food at the soup kitchen" almost feels like I would feel WORSE because.....I don't know. it's like the consolation prize a single woman gets, to always be serving others and never really have fun or happiness herself. 

And as for friends....well, I lost a few people during the pandemic. One person moved away and didn't really bother to say goodbye (I guess they were actually more of an acquaintance, or at least that's how I ranked in their mind) and one or two other people were very rude and dismissive about the idea of masking and then later on the vaccine, and while on some level I've forgiven them, it's changed how I feel about them and I don't spend as much time around them any more.

And I've not really met anyone new, and I realized during the isolation times that my colleagues weren't as interested in my well being as I thought they might be, or as I was in theirs.

So the big thing the pandemic taught me is: you're in this alone, kid. 

And I don't know how to fix that. And that's something I mourn: the loss of the illusion that I had friends. The loss of the illusion that certain people cared about me. I know I'm a lot more closed-off again (like I was when I was younger and experienced some degree of rejection) but I'm also not able to thrive all alone like I could somehow when I was in college. (I think in college it is that I could walk out of my apartment and literally almost anything I wanted was within a short walk of me; here some things - many things - are a long drive away, and during the no-driving-time of 2020 I found that somehow Sherman and Dension became much farther from me than they once were, and going anywhere now feels like a production)

I wish I could get back to that "alone but thriving" but I'm not sure I remember how.
I know part of it is that if I'm quiet for too long, without distractions, my brain goes to sad places - perhaps I'm not done mourning the people I lost yet? I know I worry more. If I call someone and don't reach them I worry. If someone I care about through social media doesn't post for a couple days, I worry (and I rejoice when they post again). 

I've found I much more need "quiet noise" around me when I'm at home - I put on streaming music or lofi hip hop (which is music but not the SAME as the classical I usually listen to) or I have some kind of re run of a cartoon or cooking show or animal show on low volume, because it eats up a little bit of my attention and maybe stops my brain screaming at me so much.

(I really do wonder if I either developed, or experienced an exacerbation of already-existing, something like ADHD or anxiety. I used to control my brain better! But I don't now - my memory is worse, my attention span is worse, some days even my fine motor skills are noticeably worse. To the point where I ask myself  "normal aging, fallout from the past couple years, or do I genuinely have something medically wrong?")

And I don't know where I'm going with this. It's just - it feels like these past few years have been so many failures (my own: I feel like i didn't teach nearly as well as I could have, I didn't do ANY research, I gave up on trying to reach out to people after one or two instances of being rebuffed, but also the failure of others and of society as a whole). And very few successes. And I want some successes; I desperately need to feel like a success, which is why Canvas had me crying in my office yesterday. I mean, I've got it minimally figured out so I can at least post stuff but the pages are gonna be clunky and ugly and I know the students are going to complain, but I am not good enough to make them pretty and I'm not sure I have the time or energy to "git gud" as they say. 

Anyway. What would I want? I don't know. Maybe more time off. Maybe a chance to go places with fun nice things like friendly alpacas I could pet or good hiking trails (and temperatures cool enough for hiking to be possible) and friends to do stuff with and the time and motivation to do a lot of the projects I want to do and a cleaner and more-organized house, but it's harder to get there from here - for the things that would even be possible - than it felt like before the pandemic; I feel like it's a Great Wall in my life that separates a "me" that had some sense of possibilities and some hopes and dreams from the "me" now who is sort of fighting and clawing some days to keep going.

I don't know. Maybe it gets better? Maybe it doesn't? Maybe this is what a midlife crisis looks like? I don't know. (And no: I don't have the time or money for counseling right now, before you ask, and I know someone will. I just need to keep white knuckling a while longer; things are better now than in 2022 and 2021 even if they're not ideal, maybe they'll be better still in 2024? I don't know). 

But yes. I think a LOT of us are carrying around a lot of unresolved grief and bewilderment at what happened, and frustration at things and people and events and yet it feels like the world wants us to just pick back up and ignore that ANYTHING ever happened.....and I can't do that. I can work it into my worldview but I can't go back to who I was in, say 2015.