"3 DAYS TIL SPRING"
“FIRE PLACES ARE BURNING”
“How are you doing?” my husband asked me a few nights ago, after it was clear that we would probably be staying inside for a few weeks but before those few weeks started. We ask each other this several times over the course of an average day, because we’re both fairly anxious people, chemically speaking, with a tendency to read far too much intent into affect shifts that are actually meaningless. It’s much less stressful at the end of the day to check in with each other at a likely abnormal frequency than to clear up misunderstandings based on often unconscious indicators such as body language.
“Good,” I said, and then “I mean, good, all things considered,” and then I thought about it a little more and said, “In a weird way, I think I might be the best I’ve ever been.”
I’ve heard a few people say that now, meaning “best” in the sense of most functional, most adapted to living under these conditions, most adjusted to this newly widespread definition of normal. It has primarily been people who live with germophobia or OCD who have said, “This is going to sound weird, but I almost feel vindicated.” It makes sense. I’ve been hypervigilant all my life, always aware of the people around me and the outward indicators of their thoughts and feelings and what they might do next. I acquired this tendency, which has both real upsides and real downsides, the way most people do: by living in fear for a very long time, while my brain was still learning how to parse the world. Since then I’ve put a lot of time and energy into fixing that wiring so that, for example, I’m not permanently on the edge of a panic attack or a breakdown.
That’s something else I’ve talked about with a few people. You put all this work into managing your anxiety or PTSD or OCD or depression, developing coping strategies so that you don’t constantly feel like the world is going to end if you don’t fulfill whatever arbitrary expectation, or feel at risk in every public place, or shy away from human contact, and then something like this comes along and all those old bad habits roar right back to life.
In many ways, this is what my brain has been built for all along: a situation like the one I grew up in, where it is advantageous to keep an eye on the interpersonal weather and make sure you can take care of yourself. The traumatized brain is self-centered, a description I use with no value judgement attached but simply to describe what inevitably happens to a brain that is tethered to a moment in its own past, mired in the distorted thinking that it used to maintain some degree of normal function under abnormal circumstances. Trauma is when you are haunted by yourself, or more specifically by the person you were once forced to be in the context of a danger that is no longer immediate.
A lot of the way I perceive reality, including the accuracy of that perception, is based on context. For example, when I’m not regulating very well, it’s easy for me to believe that my emotional perception is the objective truth — the familiar becomes terrifying, the unfamiliar too much to think about — and to forget that any other version of reality is even possible. Today and yesterday, I’ve noticed that when I’m inside for too long, I almost forget that the world outside is different now. After a few hours of sitting on the couch and scrolling through Twitter, the day starts feeling like a normal (if unexpected) weekend. Last night, less than twelve hours after we found out what it looks like when a hospital prepares to deal with pandemic levels of patient intake and potential unrest, Dylan had to remind me about the armed guard and the emergency entrance bottleneck before I could stop worrying that I was taking things too seriously. So far, we’ve been trying to preempt those moments of cognitive distortion by going on drives, keeping track of whether people in Cleveland are staying in or going out, taking a look at the writing on the wall.
A lot of people who probably shouldn’t be are outside; a lot of businesses that probably shouldn’t be are open. In the richer parts of the west side of Cleveland, however, there’s nobody outside. Garbage bags are piled up on lawns, and halfway down driveways. Crocker Park is deserted in a way I’ve never seen it, even for a Tuesday afternoon at the shopping complex: The IMAX theater is closed, as are a number of other retailers, though Trader Joe’s is still open. Downtown Cleveland is empty as well, made more eerie by campus closures at Cleveland State University and Tri-C.
We took some extra time to drive through the downtown Cleveland Clinic campus, where you can usually see doctors in white coats walking around like a crowd shot in Scrubs. It was totally deserted; most of the building lobbies were empty behind their glass frontages, except for a few places where people were clustered — presumably more bottlenecks. Then, at the edge of campus, we came upon the line of cars waiting for drive-through testing. It was so long that when we passed it, I didn’t even have to ask Dylan to double back so I could start recording.
And those are just the people who have been pre-screened by a physician. (The clinic is only testing people who have a doctor’s order at the moment.) It’s hard not to imagine that a lot more people should be tested, but aren’t. One of Dylan’s coworkers has a roommate who tested positive for COVID-19. One of our shared coworkers has a sister who just got tested, but has to wait 3–5 days for results. Earlier today, one of the stylists told me that a client who visited the salon on Feb. 15 got tested yesterday. I’ve been thinking a lot about a client who works at a pharmacy and came in for a consult on Jan. 30. Five days later, they came back for a color appointment and told us that they had pneumonia, but that their fever had already broken, so they weren’t contagious. (I didn’t bother to check whether that was true or not given that we’d already been exposed.)
Three days later, Dylan was so sick that when he went into work in order to be sent home, they didn’t ask questions or raise any kind of objection, and he works for one of the companies you’ve probably seen in the news recently for treating its employees more like disposable gloves than people. He had all the same symptoms that are being reported in confirmed COVID-19 cases in his age range and with his immune vulnerabilities. We didn’t get tested, because we had no idea COVID-19 was already in the United States. Even if we did, we might not have, because generally neither of us has money to spend on a doctor’s visit for something that might easily be a flu, something where they tell you there’s nothing they can do, keep drinking fluids and take ibuprofen if you develop a fever, send you home, and send you a bill.
Whatever upper respiratory illness Dylan had, two of the stylists got it as well — but we always get a bad cold or two in the winter, and it always runs through the salon. We’re service workers; we get every illness that goes around in a given season. Both of them kept coming to work, because if we aren’t at work, we aren’t getting paid. I never felt sick, but I spent a few days shivering uncontrollably, rasping a little, and taking Nyquil in order to sleep through the night. When we went to a regular follow-up appointment with our GP, I was running a slight fever and my blood pressure was higher than usual, enough that the doctor remarked on it. I tweeted something snarky about it and then forgot about it until a week or two ago, when we started wondering a little more about what kind of cold might make your lungs hurt. The data comparing incidence per age group in South Korea, where testing was widespread, and Italy, where it was not, could suggest that a large number of people in my age range contract the infection but never present enough symptoms to get tested.
As of now, there are 67 confirmed COVID-19 cases in Ohio. The presidential primary scheduled for today has been postponed to June, though the state Democratic Party filed suit asking the court to move the postponement back to April. As this op-ed notes, “As Ohio goes, so goes the nation.”
—R.