Featured Refresh
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If you feel your mental health has changed since the pandemic started, talk a bit about how, and why.
I feel like I have gone through the whole grief cycle in the last year. First “it’ll never come over here” and “it won’t last”. Then great and anxiety about food supply chains and wishing desperately that we had room in our tiny house for a chest freezer. Then “what the hell people, wear your damn masks or we’ll all be trapped in our homes forever!” Many, many weeks of depression and palpable anxiety. And finally, in just the last week or two, something approaching acceptance. I’ve figured out a system that works for me while [my husband] is deployed, and hopefully will work for him when he gets back and we have to share the space again. E. has a good routine and social life with daycare and our daycare family bubble. I can bake amazing challah and pizza dough after making them both nearly every week for more than 50 weeks now. More and more people around me are getting vaccinated. Maybe soon I can be vaccinated. There is still a cynical voice in the back waiting to be let down or disappointed, but in general the optimist is winning.
March 21, 2021
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How is the coronavirus pandemic affecting your life right now? Tell us about your experiences, feelings, and thoughts.
Coming home from errands around town yesterday (hardware store, grocery) : I say to myself "We are never going to get this pandemic under control because of ignorance or malice. We are a failed state--with repercussions of that failure killing us." Scenes: at the hardware store --an obviously ill sales clerk--underweight perhaps from chronic malnutrition, feverish, coughing, mask failing off his nose gives me directions to aisle 10. He is probably part-time (to save store from sick leave), making a low wage, and at work because he cant afford not to be. A friend refers to "Plantation America." I think of Dickens, Bleak House, death of Jo, the lowly crossing sweeper, by smallpox that also infects his "betters". Then there are always one or two enraged customers barreling into the store mask-less, daring anyone to cross them, and the sales clerks making too little money to enforce store policy or state ruling. So I head home, masked, slathered in hand sanitizer and wonder will I now end up intubated in 14 days because I needed a carton of milk and a bag of potting soil?
January 1, 2021