Well, COVID got me and I'm numb
After two years of expending a lot of mental energy on avoiding it, it's a weird feeling
I’m a slow processor. People tend to fall into one of the three categories in dire situations—flight, flight, or freeze—and I’m (mostly) a freezer. When my survival instinct is activated for whatever reason, I often disassociate and leave part of my consciousness suspended in the difficult moment, frozen in time, while the rest of me moves on, often with bubbly affect or with a degree of eerie remove. Or, I intellectualize the problem, talking about the feelings that should be associated, but not feeling the feelings. You feel me? <wink>
Months or years later, when the part of my consciousness that I left behind in the muck catches up to present-day me, it’s PISSED and throws tantrums, sending a whole host of difficult emotions I never dealt with back THEN into the me that is unsuspecting, whistling along in the NOW. It’s disorienting.
Sometimes a meltdown I’m having today might have more to do with something that happened a year(s) ago than it does the current moment. Honestly, I still haven’t processed March 2020. Shit, I’m not sure I’ve processed 2016. Yet time keeps rolling forward, leaving my amygdala behind.
Sometimes, when my brain does come a-knocking like, “Hello, let’s deal with some things from the past,” I’ll reflexively re-direct the anxiety about the big things my brain is offering up into ruminations about trivial things as a way of avoidance. Since I‘m worrying about something, I can trick myself into thinking the agita is productive, but it’s actually diverting my psyche from what really needs attention. Oy vey.
And, so, I’m finding this cycle repeating again this week as I tested positive for COVID after expending a significant portion of my mental energy on eluding it for the better part of two years. Maybe it should feel devastating. Or like a relief! Or a complicated mix of both? But it doesn’t feel like anything. At least emotionally. Physically, it feels like hay fever with a dose of brain fog. (I’m vaxxed and boosted so the symptoms are fairly mild.)
I can sense the subconscious splintering already underway. The me writing this post has waved goodbye to the corner of my consciousness that I’m abandoning, leaving it to deal with this bad news while I move on, keeping it frozen there to cope. And although I’ve done enough inner work to recognize the pattern, I don’t really have a surefire way to stop my mind-body from defaulting to this survival response. (And I’m not 100% sure I should? It’s there to protect me after all. The mechanism is hardwired.)
That said, I can try to speed up the processing by talking about things as they’re happening. That’s what this post is an attempt to do—a rambling, sputtering attempt to trap all of me here in this moment, to feel the discomfort, or to at least talk about it to keep me connected. Attempts at predicting the future are futile, and even though I’m extremely detached from the fact that I have COVID and finding it difficult to have anything real to say about it (hence the post about processing, rather than a post about COVID itself), I suspect two things that might come up for me later when it’s time to deal with all of this are:
Confronting ugly parts of myself. This means releasing bullshit ideas that I was somehow ‘virtuous’ for not having had COVID thus far. This is a highly contagious virus; contracting it is not a reflection on one’s character. So this step will likely require me to root out the hierarchical views that I held, subconsciously placing me above those who had gotten sick. Sure, I never consciously thought “I am better than those infected” but now, as I reflect, what does my genuine shock that I got COVID say, if I dig a little deeper? If I’m brutally honest, the shock might be coming from an elitist place that needs to be challenged and talked back to.
Grieving. Over 6 million people worldwide have died from COVID. Of course, grieving this means mourning the dead. But for me it also means grieving the fact that we had the tools to keep this better under control. We had miraculous tools that were created in record time due to a global mobilization of resources—and they are being squandered to this day. It means allowing myself to feel deep sorrow that misinformation about vaccines and masks kept people sick and confused, and caused many preventable deaths. And the fact that the media environment that contributed to a lot of unnecessary suffering (Fox News, OAN, Facebook, et al) made tons of money while they manufactured a culture war out of common-sense mitigation measures, really stings. It feels like murder-for-hire. Sick. Yes, I have felt outrage about this many times over the past two years. But outrage is easy. I think I’ve protected myself from the grief. And it is sad, a sadness that should be held and released—eventually.
Who knows what else might come up? I’ll let you know in 2030 when I finally process my 2022 COVID infection ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
What about you? Have you gotten the virus? Avoided it thus far? What feelings, or lack thereof, have come up for you? Share if you’re up to it. Otherwise, take it easy.
Susan Sontag wrote a brilliant book about cancer-shaming decades ago. An idea popularized by Norman Mailer, it boiled down to this: getting cancer was a sign of some deep psychological dysfunction, usually repression of sexuality or something like that. Until I read her, I feared being diagnosed with cancer would be a kind of spiritual death warrant and proof of a badly damaged psyche. Now I have low-grade leukemia and I don't think it has spiritual origins. The reason I tell you this is because Covid-shaming strikes me as comic and absurd after all those decades of high-IQ cancer-shaming. And, believe me, there was some mighty minds among the cancer shamers like Wilhelm Reich. So rest easy. By the way, I swore my second booster shot GAVE me Covid because the reaction felt like flu. It wasn't. But I had one miserable night of leg cramps, brain fog and arm soreness.
Fantastic essay. So well said. I share many of the same thoughts and feelings. I'm resentful of the constant culture wars and more resentful that we are so splintered that we are unable to share the same factual reality. I keep busy with many mindless tasks to ward off a pessimistic, depressing view of where we are heading. I found two plus years of virtual isolation is taking a toll not just on me but on all of us. I have to work hard at finding peace and preserving it, and making that the goal I strive for. I miss my sometimes pre-covid playfulness. I hate having negative internal feelings of anger at the "denyers" and "non-compliers". I know with 100% percent certainity that I never want to hear the work "woke" again. In my rebellious,- hippish - years of demonstrations and self-righteous idealism, I never imagined that the final episode of my life would feel so weighed down.