The Pandemic Pull

It’s a confusing time to be alive, amiright? I honest-to-God feel like I’m living in some kind of macabre TV show, a Groundhog Day/The Good Place/The Walking Dead mashup.

Every day brings a new challenge, usually in the form of an ethical or moral conundrum. We don’t want the economy to collapse, so we want to open up—but if we open up too soon, we may amp the spread of virus and overwhelm our healthcare systems. We yearn to see our family and friends, but wouldn’t be able to live with ourselves if we unknowingly carried COVID-19 to anyone we love. We want to support our local food places by ordering take-out, but are we bringing virus home on the food containers?

The very hardest thing for me lately, though, has been the polarity of my emotional responses. They are, in layman’s terms, “all over the fucking place.” Those who know me well know I’ve never exactly been a “medium emotion” kind of gal—I tend to have big feels. But this? The reactions that are coming with this pandemic bullshit? I’ve never felt so drawn and quartered, so pulled in very different emotional directions all at once:

I am in love with humanity for the sacrifices many have made to protect people at risk. I am disgusted with the many who continue to act in ways that puts their entitlement, shortsightedness, and lack of empathy on display. I am so grateful to be able to work: for the sense of agency and usefulness, the structure, the income. I am exhausted with the weight of others’ despair, anxiety, and grief. I want to be as connected as I can to my family and my world. I want to be alone as much as possible. I want to swallow the news cycle whole. I want to never hear the words “uncertain times” again. I am doing enough. I am never enough.

(I honestly get tired just reading that paragraph.)

If I were my client, I'd say to me, “You don’t have to choose. You don’t have to be either happy or sad, you can be both. People are neither entirely good nor bad, they’re both. Let it all in. Make room—I know you can. Let all the feelings make you bigger, so that you have more space in you the next time something is hard.”

And yet. Suggesting to anyone that they can hold all of these pandemic feels at once—the rage and the compassion, and sorrow and the hope, the restlessness and the acceptance—it’s a big ask. It’s so much holding. It’s exhausting. And I’m feeling it.

And I wonder if you are, too.