Anxiety and Appreciation

I probably hadn’t gone 47 straight days of eating exclusively at home since I was in high school 40 years ago. 

Bam! Dining out is prohibited.

When my husband brought home takeout barbecue last week — thank goodness restaurants can open for takeout — it was such a treat that I felt I should dress up for date night. I was already wearing my “better” sweatpants, so I didn’t bother. The next day, we were still crowing about our special meal: “Wasn’t that so much fun?” If you’d told me three months ago that I’d stop going to restaurants, I would have reacted with astonishment and, probably, petulance. 

Turns out I miss restaurants a lot less than I would have assumed. Tom and I are doing well at sharing the cooking. The joy of finding ourselves as compatible as ever, now that we’re both at home all day, helps us keep our moods level.

“Bully for you,” as my mom would say. Obviously, not everyone has such an easy time of it. Most of our favorite restaurants have furloughed or laid off their staffs, who now worry about the rent even more than they did before in this brutally overpriced city. Will people who have lost their jobs ever recover financially? If people who can afford to do so support the surviving restaurants, will workers be rehired before evictions become a possibility? I’d rather hope for something more awesome for workers than mere survival — something like much higher pay and healthcare benefits.

What about other independent businesses? My own personal-training business is reduced to five clients who can train via FaceTime. I’ve offered free group-exercise classes via Zoom and have shared the unsolicited tip money with the small, independent local gym I had just joined. I had only gone to five classes when the stay-at-home order came down. Like restaurants, the gym and others like it have, like restaurants, high rent and low margins, and are closed for the duration. They have lent dumbbells and kettlebells to their members and are offering creative and fun classes over Zoom. I hope their resilience and client loyalty keep independent gyms strong so they can reopen “when this is all over.”

I’m trying to stop using that phrase. As soon as I say it I feel nervous. “When”: no idea. “This is all over”: Meaning what? When office workers go back in, wearing masks on the bus and losing their balance while trying not to hold on? When unemployment goes back down to three percent? I think it may be more like menopause: when this crisis has been undetectable for a year, then you can say it’s over. 

All these landmarks are beyond the horizon.

I feel mental fatigue as my mind sprints back and forth between what I perceive and what I know. I feel perfectly healthy. I go walking and I see healthy-looking people working in their yards. It makes me want to walk to a friend’s house and visit. But no — we are a danger to each other! Don’t do it. 

I willingly comply, but it takes a surprising amount of mental labor to think and act as if I’m infected, wearing a mask and avoiding people on the sidewalk. I’m not saying I want to get on a plane, goes my rationalizing mind. I just want to go on a day trip. I won’t, because I understand the imperative not to spread the virus. But I’m healthy, so it’s impossible for me to spread the virus, right? Maybe not; maybe I’m just asymptomatic. This is my mind’s loop. The mental labor is tiring and I’m ready for bed early.

Another group struggling with this mental conflict, I imagine, is young adults whose developing world has stopped. They’re told to wait — to return home from wherever they’ve launched and live with the parents “until this is over,” or to attend online school and not see their friends.

When I recall my late teens and early twenties, I can’t imagine I would have been able to stay home alone with my parents or, later, in my apartment. I’m sure I would have broken the rules. I think the young-adult urge to socialize and to pair up is as powerful a drive as the urge of a toddler to climb the furniture. If I, in my fifties, find it hard not to see friends while feeling healthy, I sincerely believe the conflicting priorities — one’s most compelling emotional needs versus the safety of all — are even more exhausting for young adults. On top of it, they lack the perspective to see this as temporary, or to believe that in the long run “this” will (one hopes) not seem to have lasted very long. I feel for them.

I feel for grandparents who can’t see the grandchildren and I feel for single parents who may be overwhelmed and worried about getting sick. I feel for everyone who has to go off to work while I get to stay home. I wish I could telepathically transmit some of my good health into each person I see working in the grocery store, each mail carrier and driver and hospital employee and so on. 

I dislike the facile phrasing of gratitude that I’ve seen from prominent people (for example, during the “One World: Together At Home” concert. Celebrities said, “Thank you to everyone working in the grocery stores so that we can stay home.” “Thank you to the delivery people who are keeping us safe.” 

The us-and-them language makes me think of a feudal king addressing his peasants. Grocery workers, delivery drivers, and all workers deserve gratitude for everything that they do, which happens also to coddle the well-off — but that isn’t the purpose of their work. They’re individuals with jobs that they do in order to pay the bills, not an army of protectors of some ill-defined “us.” “Thank you for keeping ‘us’ safe” is piling an awful lot onto their work duties, it seems to me. Not that workers shouldn’t be thanked.

How do I want the privileged to express gratitude? I’d rather hear “I” when describing one’s comfortable circumstances, to avoid evoking some supposedly inclusive club (an “us”) that actually includes few. “I’m grateful that I can stay home safely, and I’m grateful to delivery drivers,” period. Acknowledge the importance of workers as human beings, without sounding as if you think it’s their job to “keep ‘us’ safe.” I fervently hope that every essential service worker can make a living without getting sick, and want their customers to protect them by wearing masks, standing back, and limiting interactions. I’m grateful for the privilege of working at home, and I’m grateful to each person who sells me groceries or brings me what I need, for pay. It’s easier now to see the vital importance of this work.

What about the worry over actually catching the virus? It’s the elephant in the room that my friends and I don’t talk much about. We talk about our moods, our families, and our household concerns, and not about the prospect of our own selves catching COVID-19. We don’t talk about household plans we’ve put in place in case we get sick. Why not? Maybe because such an invisible danger seems remote. If I catch the virus, I imagine I’m going to be very scared of the loss of control that will occur if my health plummets. It reminds me of what an older friend used to say when I was a teenager: “Control is an illusion.” 

All of this is not even to mention the prospect of the United States as a culture, as a political entity, never recovering from the damage it’s sustained in the Trump era — which I realize started well before 2016 — with the pandemic piled on top. I’m afraid of the USA being torn apart and ending up wholly and openly run by intimidation and brutality. I don’t think the states are united, and I wonder doubtfully if it will ever feel like one country again during my lifetime.