Your Pandemic Ain't Like Mine, Part I.

A year later, it's hard not to feel some kind of way about the people who seemed to never miss a beat when the rest of us went into hiding.

I spent a significant amount of time in the past year convinced that I was going to contract the Coronavirus and that I would not survive it. Though I am in relatively good health, I am a regular marijuana smoker (they said smoking made you high risk!) and I am a Black woman (I wrote about my specific anxieties in that regard last April and published it here this month), which felt like reason enough for great concern.

Luckily, I did eventually come to a point when I realized that claiming tragedy would do nothing to prevent it, and I worked very, very hard to cultivate a more optimistic outlook about my future, both in regard to this moment in history and in general. I started going harder on my ‘woo-woo’ stuff: meditating, praying, various other forms of spiritual work. (We’ll never be talking about that part of my life in depth because I don’t think that is something to be shared with strangers on the internet; I can’t trust all of you, let’s be honest. I’ll just say it helped tremendously.)

But even before I could reset my personal mindset as it related to COVID, I decided that social distancing represented my best chance at making it out of the pandemic and that it was something that I had to do in the interest of ensuring that others might also survive.

I can count the number of homes I have visited in the past year (4 unmasked, 2 masked), the number of unmasked guests I have had in my home (3), the times I have rested my head elsewhere (once, for a weekend in the mountains with a group of other women that started out socially distanced but didn’t stay that way.) I ate at an outdoor restaurant one time. Got my nails done in a parking lot twice, and once in a shop that was empty with the doors open.

That is not to say that I’ve been perfect. I’ve had work done in the house by masked folks from TaskRabbit. I go to Target and other stores at times to give myself something to do outside of the house. I order food for pick-up a couple of times a week, and I def go to the ice cream shop (okay, a handful of ice cream shops) way more often than any adult woman who is not in the company of a child should. But I have not been on a plane, nor went to a party, spent time with my friends, seen my family, or dated actively in person in a year. I have had sex one time in an entire year. One. Time.

I gave up nearly everything that I could because I didn’t want to die and I didn’t want to be the reason other people died.

Now that there is, at the very least, the ability to foresee a time in the future after Covid, I can’t help but reflect on the fact that while many of us were making these drastic life changes and sacrifices, others did nothing—nothing—to help bring this nightmare to an end any sooner. And while we must look at all governments, local, national, and across the world to appropriately scrutinize their contribution to this reality, that does not, for me, change the fact that many, many people met “If you take these steps, you can keep other people safe” with “I’m not worried about dying of this thing so I’m not going to do shit.”

How might this past year look if we’d all tried? If we’d all been willing to give our best efforts to social distancing? If we all had sacrificed parties and holiday gatherings? (I’m trying not to call everyone who met for Thanksgiving a f*cking loser right now, it is very hard; Turkey Day? You were willing to let Auntie Myrtle fast track her ride to the ancestors for some f*cking Turkey Day? LOOOOOL I am so sorry, you are a f*cking loser to me. Just to ME! I ain’t nobody, but just know, you are a loser in my nobody-ass eyes.)

What if we actually gave a damn about people who are more vulnerable than us? In addition to realizing that many of us are more vulnerable than we know, of course. What if we weren’t so thoroughly ruined by capitalism that we could actually fathom doing something good that might not have a direct ROI for us…even though, I do think “the end of a global pandemic” should be a group project anyone who is forced to live on said ‘globe’ might wish to undertake.

What is going forward going to look like, when those of us who lost a year and those of us who didn’t return to a world that is forever different, arguably due in part to the latter group and the complete useless-ass-nothingness they contributed when we needed them to show up and at least show a little compassion?

I recently went off on a woman I love and admire because I thought she had been jet-setting. She graciously accepted my apology. But don’t we deserve to go off on the people who really had a 2020? Those who didn’t stop, not because they couldn’t, but because nothing made them. Are we supposed to just be all good now after this? I don’t know how that’s going to fly for me.

I know that I am a human being, which means that I am flawed. I am an American, by the circumstances of my birth and with no measure of pride, which means that I am inclined to be selfish. I also know that I am one of the least disciplined folks I’ve ever met. But they told me that if I wore a mask and stayed distant, I could keep people from dying! As a person who does not like death very much, this was a very enticing proposition, I could not turn it down.

Did the rest of you just not care? Did the idea of people you didn’t know dying just fail to make you feel anything at all? Did you not believe the government because they be lying? Okay, but what about when all the people kept dying? Did you think that was a trick? A joke? Not your problem?

I don’t regret any of what I gave, just the moments that I feel short and could have been safer. I will spend a lot of time, like many others, trying to recover from 2020 and at least some part of 2021, but at least I can say I tried. I wish more people could say the same.