For The Future

When I’m in times of trouble, I often turn to writing. 

I’m not good at speaking the things I’m feeling out loud, and oftentimes it just ends with me crying. Any intense emotion— fear, anxiety, frustration, anger— it all makes me cry. 

I grew up in one of those families where I was often threatened with things like, “I’ll give you a reason to cry,” which often was followed up with some kind of punishment. So to me, crying is intrinsically tied in to bad things. I don’t like doing it, and on the occasion I do cry, it’s generally over very quickly. 

Emotionally stunted, and objectively not healthy? Yes. But also, I live in America, I can’t afford therapy. 

But lately, it’s all I can think about: How badly I want to cry. 

I know there’s a lot going on for everyone right now— there are people who have it worse than me, there are people who have it better— but I’m not here to play the pain Olympics with them.

I’m just here to try and write about how I feel, to get these emotions off my chest and move on from them. I’ve been made fun of for how I write out my emotions, taking entirely too many words and putting too much effort into them. But I don’t know any other way to do it, and at least it’s better than crying. 

Plus, I’m sure I’m not the only person feeling this way right now. 

I’ve also been thinking a lot about how people joke that we need to start journals, so 100 years from now there will be primary sources for what life was like mid COVID-19. What will middleschoolers with reports on the early 2000s do without our blog entries and records of the times?

So I’ve decided to combine these two ideas. Because let’s be honest, a large part of the reason I want to cry is COVID-19. 

For anyone hundreds of years from now reading this: It sucked. Quarantine sucked. Watching friends and family get sick, or risk their health sucked. Having to work when you know working would risk your life sucked. 

None of it was good. Sure, people write feel good pieces about humanities shared bonding, but that’s just a side effect of any massive global trauma, it’s not a good thing. 

This is as expected, I imagine. No one ever thought the Black Death sounded like a jolly good time. The suckage isn’t anything we can’t handle, and at least medicine has come a long way since 1347, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t taken a toll. 

I have asthma, mild to severe, which I serendipitously discovered in 2018, just a year before that fact would become EXTREMELY relevant to everything I do. It’s severe enough that in the summers, when the air is thick and the pollen count is high, it becomes hard to breathe. Each breath would become a struggle, with my whole body wheezing and gasping just to function. At night, I would lay in bed convinced I wouldn’t wake up in the morning, I was getting so little air. 

It was like choking, when you had no reason to choke, like the whole world was holding a pillow over your face, and there was no way to pull it off. That is what Asthma feels like. 

I’m on medication now, and for the most part I have it under control. Which was a godsend when COVID became an imminent threat in my life. 

When it first rolled in, I seemed to be the only person paying attention to it. My husband travels internationally, and so I was keenly aware that when he came home, he might just well be exposing me to Corona virus, or that we would both be forced into mandatory quarantine.

At the time, the virus was still being wildly referred to by a racist moniker, many thought it was a scam, or that it was a hoax. But I had seen the videos from Italy, heard first hand from my husband who was in Europe and worked with people in China, how it was affecting people he knew. 

It was easy for me to see how the virus was coming here, and quickly. So I would ask my boss about what would happen if it did come here. If I would get paid if I was forced to quarantine. What would we do if someone got sick? 

Even medicated, I’m still in the high risk group for the virus, and I made this very clear to those I work with. I let them know that continuing to stay open and operate was a risk to my life, and that if the virus came into the hotel, I would likely get sick. I tended to catch everything that came through that hotel, as my immune system is clearly not up to snuff. 

I was largely brushed off, told the virus would never be declared a pandemic. 

Then the US lock downs started, my work ground to a halt, and suddenly everyone was concerned about the virus. But in an abstract kind of way. Social distancing wasn’t seen as necessary, and I was paranoid and outlandish for insisting that things were going to get worse. 

Only two weeks into the US chapter of the pandemic, I did get sick. 

I very suddenly lost my sense of taste, one of the apparently ‘secret symptoms’ of corona virus in young people. Tests were unavailable, or hard to come by, and I was the first person in my social circle to be seriously in danger of having it. It was hard for me to breathe, I was using a meter to measure my lung capacity twice daily and watching as it went down as each day passed. I would check my temperature constantly, and when I finally heard back from the doctor, I was miraculously cleared to get a test. 

I drove myself to get tested, put a Q-tip in my nose (the test REALLY isn’t that bad), and drove home to wait. 

Thankfully, I didn’t have Corona virus. But I did catch Bronchitis from a coworker who had worked THE DAY BEFORE ME. I had no first person contact with this coworker, and I had caught his bronchitis. 

This cemented the fact that yes, if Corona virus did enter the building, I would, without a doubt, catch it. 

The last day I worked was March 31st, and I didn’t return to work part time until June, and I went back to full time in July, just one week ago at the time of writing. 

Corona virus is worse now than it was when I left work, with cases skyrocketing as lock down restrictions were erroneously reduced far too early. 

I escape Corona virus once, but now I’m right back where I started in February, when I first became aware of the virus’s imminent threat to the US. 

For months now I’ve been watching those around me play fast ball with my life, both in my workplace and abroad, not taking the virus seriously, or claiming that it’s caused by 5G. (Yes, I really work with a man who believes this.) 

Each person I see without a mask is a threat to my life. Every time I go to work, it’s a threat to my life. 

I already find it difficult to breathe, struggle with medical bills related to my conditions (asthma, physical disabilities and therapy, celiac, etc.), and I know acutely what it feels like to not be able to breathe. To feel like your lungs aren’t working. 

It’s awful. And it’s what I live in fear of every day. 

The people around me, they don’t know. They can’t imagine what it is they’re threatening me with, but even if I explain the risks, how vulnerable I am, they don’t seem to care. It’s the plight of many vulnerable and high risk people right now. 

My life is inconsequential to them, our lives are. To some, I deserve to be sacrificed to keep an economy moving, or I’m aiding in the propagation of a liberal scam. And to some, I plain don’t matter. They don’t care about me, and aren’t willing to inconvenience themselves to keep me alive. Even when that inconvenience is just a mask.

I’m again reminded of the article I Don’t Know How To Explain To You That You Should Care About Other People.

But it’s not other people in question here. It’s me. Me, personally. Someone who is at high risk for COVID-19 complications: permanent organ damage, heart attack, impaired lung function. Death. 

I don’t know how to convince my coworkers, my friends, my family, to care about me. Every time they break social distancing, and then ask me to come to their home, it means they don’t care. Every time they barge into my office without a mask, they don’t care. Every time they wander the halls “radiation meter” in hand without a mask, it means they don’t care. When they’re surprised I won’t attend their wedding or baby shower, it means they don’t care. 

Almost everyone I know, family, coworkers, friends, they don’t care about me. And it’s never been more obvious than now. Sure, my husband, my best friends, they care, they follow guidelines, but most people I know, they do not.

I’m not worth missing out on a shower so we can have a socially distanced visit. I’m not worth wearing a mask to a wedding. I’m not worth anything to so many. 

The lack of care is entirely visible too, evidenced by the lack of mask compliance I can see abound me. At a glance, I can immediately evaluate those who would let me die. 

As the threat of Corona virus became more obvious, I’ve seen some of these people start to care about themselves. Coworkers who mocked me for saying this would become a pandemic now wear a mask, help clear surfaces, try to distance. This, by extension, makes me safer. But it doesn’t take back the knowledge that, for all I’ve ever done for anyone, it doesn’t mean they care about me. 

And that’s why I want to cry.

I feel small. I feel like I’m being broken into so many tiny pieces, and each day another one falls to the ground. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to pick those pieces back up, but I can feel myself eroding away with each passing day. 

I wonder when it will end, when I’ll be free again and won’t have to think of these things. I’d like to forget about this one day, to let the memories of how small and insignificant I am fade away. But I don’t know if they ever will.

We have a long way to go before this is over. Estimates currently state, best as I can tell, we have at least another year. People are shy about putting a time frame on it in general, since it’s an evolving situation. But I also imagine they avoid it to keep from demoralizing people. 

Best I can tell, at least a year. I imagine it’ll be longer. 

I hope when it’s over that my memories do fade. But I don’t think I’ll ever be able to forget how dispensable I am to so many. 

If you’re feeling like this, please know you’re not alone. Just because so many others don’t see our value, as upsetting as that is, it doesn’t mean we have no value. We have value just by the nature of our existence. We’re here, we deserve to live, and frankly, when I’m not sad about… everything… I’m mad. 

How dare the world treat me, and every high risk person as if we’re dispensable? How dare they. 

I deserve to live. So wear your motherfucking mask.

Or I might cry again.