A friend of mine told me recently that “it comes in waves.” I couldn’t agree more. We have good days. And we have bad days. Some days we even forget what is happening. Today I forgot for a while. I was out on a run at sunset and the trail was dewy and warm with the faint beginnings of summer and you could smell flowers somewhere up the ridgeline. The gnats had come back and I ran into them too many times. There was a simple annoyance in that. It was a relief because it was so simple and small. But it isn’t always like that. These days, the smallest things might make me unreasonably upset. That’s part of it—the latent anxiety—I think.
I haven’t written anything good in a while.* Not for lack of trying. I’ll start something and stop because the bigness of this all seems to render anything I write insufficient. I know it shouldn’t be that way. I know there’s joy in creating just to create. But I’ve struggled to create anything on this. I can create funny poems and journal and do things like that. But I’ve struggled to write seriously about this. Part of that, I believe, is because of how close we are to it. There’s a certain cognitive distance that I require to covalence meaning.
I thought this situation would make me write more, not less. I thought a topic that affects almost everything would inspire bountiful analysis.** At the very least, I thought being stuck inside would force me to write. But, in reality, the immensity of potential prompts overwhelms me, and being stuck inside obfuscates my thoughts.
And then there’s this weird meta pressure: I feel like I have to write about COVID-19. But at the end of a long day, the last thing I want to do is look directly at the beast.***
But now, I think I should. I’ve had some time to adjust. It’s been a little over three weeks since things really began to change. Recently, I thought about that not-so-supported-by-science claim that it takes 21 days to form a habit and wondered if that applies. Things do feel a bit easier, at least superficially. What I’m trying to say is they feel more normal, most of the time. Of course, part of it coming in waves means that it will hit me shortly thereafter that this is not normal. When I see a couple walking down the street wearing medical masks, I realize, this is not normal. Or when I want to go home but decide to wait because I don’t want to risk getting my dad sick. That is not normal. Or when I hope for the safety of my mom and grandmother in central Pennsylvania; my girlfriend in New Jersey; my friends in New York, Seattle, California—in current hotspots and places that will, inevitably, become hotspots. None of that is normal.
But we are human, and we can make the best of it. To that end, I intend to write more, share broadly, and read anything sent my way. I usually end my essays with a call to action or some sort of parting thought. If I have one now, it is this: Don’t call it social distancing. Take after the World Health Organization and call it physical distancing, which is what it is. Proximity to each other spreads pathogens, true, but now more than ever it is important to remain connected, together in quarantine.
Stay strong,
Ben
Footnotes:
*From Kafka to Woolf, there’s a long and somewhat paradoxical history of writers writing about how they cannot write. The necessary clarification here is not that they couldn’t write, but that they couldn’t write anything formal. They wrote (that’s how we know they weren’t writing). They wrote letters and journal entries. They didn’t write novels and treatises. The writer suffering from writer’s block doesn’t cease to write completely. They cease to produce anything that they would consider good, formal writing.
**It was pointed out to me recently that there are very few things, if any, that are more than 2 degrees of separation away from COVID-19. For instance, “airlines” are one degree of separation away (they are taking huge losses). “Dolphins” are also one degree away (they’re making a come-back). “Astrophysics” might seem untouched, but it’s actually only two degrees away: NASA halted construction on its moon and Mars spacecraft because of COVID-19. Because of this, there exists a near-infinite number of different-in-kind essays that could be written using the format “The Effects of COVID-19 on FILL-IN-THE-BLANK.”
***In some ways, the pervasiveness of COVID-19 into the public consciousness (and my consciousness) makes it a bit like the beast in a horror movie: You hear about it all the time; you see glimpses of it; you are shown its effects; maybe you read about it in the New York Times. It is an omnipresence that can’t be pegged to an image. And that makes it all the more anxiety-inducing.