How You Holding Up?

I never thought I’d be asked that question so many times by so many people, let alone ask it so much. It always seemed invasive to me to ask that, always seemed to hold the expectation of a positive answer.

But things are different now. We’ve all been given blanket approval to say things are hard. We’re all in the same boat (that is a terrible metaphor for this situation. Please don’t be on a boat right now (especially a cruise ship) and keep up your social distancing). Everyone is having a hard time. There are many people with lots of privilege (myself included) who are having a less hard time than those with food insecurity, financial insecurity, job insecurity, housing insecurity, but it’s still okay to be scared and sad and depressed and anxious and furious. It’s okay to not be okay right now.

The Apocalypse

I remember once attending a panel at a con (can’t remember the con or the panelists, or even the subject of the panel) and the topic of apocalypse came up. I wish I remembered who said it because it’s stuck with me ever since and now it’s been in the forefront of my mind, but to paraphrase, “An apocalypse doesn’t have to be THE end of THE world; it can be AN end to YOUR world as you know it.” I’ve been thinking about that a lot these last few weeks.

One of the definitions of “apocalypse” in Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary is simply “a great disaster.”

This is a great disaster, a holistic disaster than may very well change our society in long-lasting and fundamental ways and it’s important to recognize it as such. None of this is normal, in fact, this pandemic may well skew the definition of normalcy. Who knows? I could speculate, but I think I’ll save that for a later blog post.

But for now, I want to know how everyone is holding up and I don’t want you to give me answers without minimizing your current experiences.

I’ll go first.

How I’m Doing

This sucks. Sure, my day-to-day hasn’t changed that much. I’ve been working from home since 2014, but that was by choice, now it’s not. I’ve been doing online Yoga classes for over a year because doing exercise in public gives me anxiety, but that was my choice to limit the amount of anxiety I go through on any given day. I don’t get out much or socialize much because I’m a homebody and I don’t really like people because interacting with too many of them (and too many for me is maybe three) is draining and inhibits my ability to function optimally. But before now, all those choices – working from home, exercising from home, staying home – they were choices and they weren’t steeped in fear.

The fear is constant. Fear for myself, for my family, my friends, fear of the people behaving stupidly or dangerously, fear of the people in positions of power making decisions that make the situation worse not better.

I accept my fear. I’m not ashamed of it, but I also can’t let it overwhelm me completely, so I’m trying to manage it. I’ve been keeping a daily journal, writing about the highs and lows, the normal things, the unprecedented things, the new restrictions, the new cases, the new deaths. I want to have a personal record of this time, a letter to my future self, a promise to myself that I will get through this and in future years I will be able to look back and read the words I’m writing now and know that I made it.

It’s harder to contain my fear for my family. I’m currently living on the opposite side of the world, about as far away from my blood relations as I can get and still be on land.

My dad works in the local Emergency Room. He’s on the front lines of this pandemic and though our rural Maine county has only seen a couple of cases so far, I have to operate under the assumption that he’s going to get it eventually. This is made all the more likely by the fact that two other physicians at his hospital have tested positive. And though I know he does his best to stay safe and to keep my mom and brother safe, so many health care workers worldwide are getting sick, and it feels like we’re just waiting for the ax to fall, or like my mother said, “it’s not in the house yet, but it’s sitting in the driveway. No longer a concept.” And now I can’t shake that image of the virus as a shadowy figure sitting in a paneled van at the head of my parents’ driveway, mask pulled down over face, hands on steering wheel, watching, and waiting to break in.

I don’t know how to process that fear healthily other than to tell myself there’s nothing I can do to control the situation. But there’s only so much telling myself I can do before I stop listening.

Scared is Good

There’s this quote from the Doctor Who episode “Listen” on the nature of being scared. “What’s wrong with scared?” The Doctor asks. “Scared is a superpower. It’s your superpower.” This is far from the only Doctor Who quote on the benefits of fear, but I find a particular comfort in hearing Peter Capaldi’s Scottish accent giving me permission to be scared, because it’s the scared people who are being responsible, who are staying home, not going on cruises during a pandemic, not going to the beaches. It’s the scared people who are going to flatten the curve as much as they can because they get what’s going on and they’re scared.

So, if you’re scared, thank you. Your fear is keeping our loved ones safe.

Keeping Busy

Don’t worry, I’m not just sitting in a stew of my own fear, tempting as that may be. I’m trying to find a way to keep positive and even though I may not find that positivity in my outlook or my mood, I can infuse it into the things I do.

I’ve talked a bit about my sewing on here before. Well, sewing is how I’m making a positive impact right now. In the US, there’s a grassroots organization of sewists working to make and distribute cloth masks to health care facilities across the country. If you want to know more, you can visit Makemasks2020.org where you can learn about how to make masks, request masks for your facility, or donate materials and money for materials to sewists working to make masks.

It might not be much, but this is something I can do and it’s keeping me off the computer, away from the news. It’s keeping my fingers busy. It’s a way for me to acknowledge the situation we’re all in right now without crumbling under the weight of my own fear. It’s the only way I know to help.

So, how are you holding up? Tell me how you feel. What are you doing to handle those feelings? How are you trying to help? Please let me know in the comments.

Thank you for reading.