On average, I feel like I’m at least mildly losing my mind about once a day. The more acute freak-outs are maybe once a week these days, a real improvement from the early days when every morning felt like a siren. I don’t know if that means that things are any better—survey says they are, at least Covid-wise, they’re manifestly worse, but at least, I know that right now, for me, things are kind of as okay as they’re going to get for a while, and that okay is not so bad.  

I still freak out, though. I freaked out today because I had hypochondriacal attack. Not about Covid, at least not really (I got negative test results back today), but that I thought my ankles werre tingling and my feet are periodically achy and numb and my right arm is a little weak, and WebMD tells me it’s probably liver failure or kidney disease of diabetes or a stroke. OH MY GOD AM I HAVING A STROKE RIGHT NOW?!  I’m embarrassed to call my doctor and afraid of a self-fulfilling prophecy. I don’t want to go in for a test because Covid. I call my mother. She laughs at me, especially after I report that I’m wearing newish running shoes that are, actually, kind of tight and I have, actually turned my ankle a couple of times on the trail and I do, yes, have recurrent plantar fasciitis and hey, now that you mention it, I have been trying to do pushups (the lady kind– I can do, like, two) in the morning, which might explain the arm. Also there are fibroids and the sciatica and I am in my mid-forties and things don’t always feel the way they used to and maybe you pinched a nerve, honey. And all these things. I nod and smile and try not to cry because on some level, even though all of these things are totally rational, I am convinced that I have a grave and possibly terminal illness, and it will invariably be one of those things that I brought on myself because I am an irresponsible hedonist who doesn’t take care of herself and every jackass in my life who ever tried to talk me into trying some new diet or lifestyle hack will be 100% vindicated once I turn up chronically ill because I am a shitty human and a terrible grown-up.  “There goes Alison,” they’ll say. “Don’t let yourself turn out like her. She lived by the fork; died by the fork. Could have told you that would have happened to her.”

And my mother will look (via Facetime) at her forty-odd  year old daughter, lip trembling like a child, scared shitless of a thing that is maybe, probably, not even real, after her long,  comforting, utterly rational monologue of Things More Likely Wrong with You than End-Stage Liver Failure and say, “But I can tell by looking at you that, you don’t really believe a single thing I’m telling you, right?”

And in those moments? I want to. I really, really want to. I’m sorry I can’t. I’m disappointed I can’t. But on some small but essential level, I don’t.

My mother sighs, reminds me that I maybe need to find a therapist (she’s not wrong), and changes the subject. Because what do you do, really when you are stuck trying to pry out something stupid and awkward from a sticky, irrational groove and it just won’t give? At some point, you just can’t pull any harder. You have to accept that there is probably nothing more you can say.

I don’t live in a world where I regularly have to talk to either Trump supporters or Covid deniers. Most of my friends and family are cautious when it comes to getting a beer outside on a patio at six feet distance, and at, best, nervous if that patio is public and there are other people around. We’re barely traveling and hardly shopping. We don’t leave home without masks.

But we’re all one or degree of separation from someone who doesn’t. You know, the relative who is absolutely having Thanksgiving with twenty-five people, or flying down to vacation at a resort in Florida with her three college buddies, or going to the mall to shop Black Friday, or dining out three times a week inside. Maybe those people believe in Covid, but believe it won’t affect them. Maybe those people don’t believe it exists at all, that it is conspiracy pitched by leftists in order to distract the general public from seeing that Hilary Clinton and Hunter Biden and are stealing children and selling them to George Soros and furniture websites in order to advance Gay Space Communism (I think I have that right).  

Talking to those people is exhausting. Especially now, if you’re still trying. Even the ones that you love, especially the ones that you love, especially the ones you think are not too angry, not too stubborn, not too far gone. You can give them all the facts. You can give them all the rational arguments. They will nod along. Maybe, just maybe they will try to believe you. And it will be painful because you’ll probably see in their eyes the same thing my mother sees in mine—“You don’t really believe a word I’m saying, do you?”

Because they won’t.

I don’t know how to work them out of their own collective delusion, the irrational fears and lies they tell themselves any more than I know how not to worry that maybe I’ll have to have my foot amputated between now and Thursday because my ankle still feels tingly. I wish I did, for all of our sakes. We all have to live in this world together, and the world will continue to be objectively more difficult, painful and virus-filled so long as they continue to operate as if it isn’t already.

I came home tonight after a much needed head-clearing drive past by the parking lot of a restaurant a couple towns over. The parking lot was packed. The patio was full. People were crowding outside waiting to go in. They were few visible masks and no evidence that it was anything but a normal Sunday, in a normal November, on the weekend before Thanksgiving. I thought, I want to be on that patio, and, right now, I can’t be. And I’m bitter about it. I don’t begrudge the restaurant for being open for opening—they need the money. I don’t even begrudge the patrons—we all make our own choices. But l I want to be able to make that choice. I want to sit in a crowded restaurant.  I want to have a dinner party. I want to have holidays where we can be together. I want to go to plays and concerts. I want to be able to hug my Dad or my little sister (haven’t done that since February).  I want a life back that isn’t so goddamn lonely and stressful and swirled with anxiety that I spend whole weekends at home because of plague, arguing with myself about whether I am dying of some other kind of plague and driving everyone I love crazy because I can’t just go do something else and snap myself out of it.

But those people in the parking lot, on the patio, crowding the foyer maskless . . . those people are stuck in their groove. I can’t push them out. I used to think the virus would, but, I mean, look at the White House.

So here we are stalemate at the holiday. Eventually, people tell me, things we’ll get back to normal. They’ll loosen, we’ll compromise. There will be a vaccine. There will be a new president. And it sounds exceedingly rational, so comforting. I want to believe it. I really, really do.

But if you look at my face, you’ll see a  forty-odd year old woman, trying to look hopeful, trying not to freak out, trying.

As of this writing, 40,765,702 people have recovered from Covid-19.