Not a Good Day

Being a cancer survivor, I'd always believed that I could handle pretty much anything life was going to throw at me after that ordeal. Yes, it completely upended my life in ways that wouldn't be immediately obvious for years, but as I've written several times before, I came through it a better person than I had been going in.

That's why the current COVID-19 pandemic has thrown me for a loop. I'm not handling it well. The quarantine, the lifestyle changes came fast and furious and I was not mentally prepared for this nearly as much as I'd believed I would be when all this started last month.

Yeah, I'm adapting, but it's not pretty. I'm swinging from emotional highs to lows on an almost daily basis; something I most certainly do not remember going through seventeen years ago. Today, after getting up to let the dogs out and feed them, I went back to bed and slept—if you could call it that—until nearly 11. When I finally got moving, Ben and I headed out in search of lunch, settling on take-out from Chili's. We pulled into a shady spot after picking up the food, but it became quickly apparent that eating in the car wasn't going to work. We deemed to take it home, knowing full well the fries would be mush by the time we got there.

This was a minor inconvenience, but it was also one. more. thing. assaulting my already frazzled emotional state. I apologized to Ben for my distance today, and he asked what's wrong. "Everything," I said. "Just everything."

We got home, tossed the fries in the toaster oven, and even though we had selected a conservative time and temp to reheat them, they ended up burning.

I didn't openly cry, but I was stifling the feelings of absolute helplessness welling up inside me, and I realized just how different this is from what I'd gone through while battling cancer.

In 2003, all I had to concern myself with was the cancer; I could focus all my attention on wiping it from my body. Sure, I'd simultaneously lost my job—that ironically allowed me to qualify for Medicaid and have all my medical expenses covered—and was scraping by on unemployment insurance and the kindness of friends and family, but not even that caused the level of anxiety and the helplessness I'm feeling right now.

And that's because I knew my care was in good hands; I had competent people guiding my treatment and recovery.

The US in 2020 has no competent people in charge. As Karen Black famously screamed in Airplane 1975, "There's no one flying the plane!" And if anything, the people in the highest echelons of government seem to be going out of their way to burn the country to the ground. The abject ignorance, selfishness, and insouciance displayed by the Orange Caligula's followers is even more alarming. If they were only going to infect themselves and die off I'd be happy to be rid of them, but their callous, uncaring attitude is going to end up killing a lot more people than just their red-hat wearing bretheren.

AND THIS DIDN'T HAVE TO HAPPEN! If we didn't have a narcissistic sociopath occupying the Oval Office, this would not have happened.

And there's nothing I can do about it until November. The 25th Amendment will never be invoked; the Republican Senate will never impeach the bastard. He literally could stand in the middle of Fidth Avenue and shoot someone and get away with it as he so famously bragged. This is why I'm feeling so helpless right now.

The infection curve was starting to flatten, but because of these knuckle-dragging Trumpsters demanding that the country open back up, we're probably looking at an even longer lockdown that we were facing before. (And BTW, have you noticed how many of these assholes are wearing masks to these protests? If the virus isn't a threat any longer, why do you need masks?)

The level of cognitive dissonance is off the charts.

I'm so thankful that Ben and I are together at this point in history to give each other the distance, or the encouragement, or the hugs we both need when we need them during this insanity.

I take some solace in knowing I'm far from being the only one experiencing these emotions right now, and the optimist in me is telling me we'll make it through this, but it doesn't do much for days like today when I just can't.

UPDATE: After initially posting this I was nodding off at my desk and that, combined with the deep funk I was in lead to an afternoon-long nap with the doggies. While not a perfect cure, it definitely helped on many levels and I'm feeling much better now.