Burnt out.
It has been more than a year of COVID and the only way I can describe it is burnt. A year ago, I was staring at the prospect of doing a job that for more than a century required face to face engagement moving to an all online environment. Zoom and Teams became much more frequent in my daily vocabulary. Grocery shopping went from walking up and down aisles to scrolling through an app. My home office became my only office and trying to find re-usable masks became a daily fight for survival. Lysol disappeared from the stores that surround me and has only recently returned.
And toilet paper…oh my God the anxiety over freakin’ toilet paper…
At first, I tried to remain as optimistic as I could. I knew that this would be temporary and would not define the rest of my life. But March turned to April, April turned to May, May turned into six months, and six months turned into today. The optimism I had slowly rotted away only to be replaced with cynicism and massive anxiety. Call me a snowflake if you want, I don’t care. I just want to go into a store without a fucking mask on worrying about the handle on a grocery cart.
I discussed the realities about COVID with a close acquaintance the other day and we compared notes on how the pandemic has affected us individually. They made the comment that unlike a huge swath of our population that were stopped dead in their tracks last spring, due to the nature of their job, they were unable to stop. Work kept going for them unabated. I, not trying to compete on any level with them, pointed out that my job did the same. The biggest difference between us was simply that my job moved into a digital realm. Thiers remained in the physical world. In each case, we both agreed that the massive shift to our culture has done serious damage to the collective psyche of the nation. People are tired of this mess, and the longevity, though small compared to a lifetime, has created long lasting damage that I don’t think we will ever recover from. There is no way we will ever come into a flu season without a twinge of extra paranoia ever again. A runny nose and a cough will inevitably become triggers for millions of on-edge Americans for decades to come. The temporary nature of this is not really that temporary.
In my own experience, I passed through a growing depression that has left me feeling as though I am always walking on a thin layer of ice in every aspect of my life. There is a constant feeling of falling through and losing everything from my home all the way down to a paper towel roll. Millions of us have become low level hoarders, and I don’t see that particular learned trait going away.
The depression also came from my own personality. I am an extrovert. My energy is largely derived from being able to interact with people. My job has always been the perfect avenue for that to be satiated and give me the natural feeling of expressing my extroverted nature.
COVID attacked that larger part of who I am as I was forced to close myself off from the entire world and find ways to achieve that feeling through a computer or smart phone screen. The interaction I naturally craved was ripped away and I was forced to engage with the world in limited ways I had never been prepared for. Add to that my former partner being physically present all the time as the only real physical interaction and life became incredibly stale and monotonous in ways that are mentally unhealthy.
My job even became a burden in ways that it had never been. Shifting from one philosophy of teaching to a completely new way of trying to interact with students in the matter of only a week forced some innovation for sure, but also threw new forms of stress that I have not engaged with before. I was isolated and emotionally alone. This has been COVID for me and so many others.
The one thing I have repeated over and over throughout this entire episode of human history is that we are going to come out of it understanding the world in much different ways than we did before. For me, that presents all sorts of opportunities and positives. There will also be the negatives and people who will ultimately exploit our base natures for a profit of some sort. Our collective future is hazy at best, but I do think this world is going to come out of this with some new and interesting ways to live. There’s my shred of optimism.
COVID has become a way of life that will take us all some time to evacuate from our routines. Some of the things we have learned will never go away which can be a positive thing. But they will remain with us to serve as a reminder of how exasperating this whole ordeal has become. I can only hope that the majority of us will focus on what we learned though this and use it for beneficial outcomes. I also hope that we become kinder and more empathetic than we were two years ago. Hope, however, is an abstract that we cling to so we don’t lose ourselves to the darker side of life. It is only when we lose grasp of it that we become the real monsters at the end of the book and convince ourselves that all is lost.
Once that happens as a collective, care becomes a fleeting nostalgic moment from the past.