PART 2: CORONA
GOING FOR A WALK
March 18, 2020
A siren suddenly rang out, piercing through the damp, heavy air. I jumped, my most primal senses jolted to action, my heart racing at the surprise of the high-pitched noise ripping through the otherwise thick silence, the mocking singsong of emergency disrupting the peace.
“Where could they possibly be going?” Orly bemused, addressing the hypothetical emergency vehicle we could hear but not see. I had still not returned to a homeostasis, my senses now alert, as if awoken and determined to not be caught off guard again. I took slow, measured breaths — in four, hold four, out eight. My sister once taught it to me when I had an incredibly untimely panic attack at my grandma’s 80th birthday dinner, calmly explaining how her therapist had taught it to her, patiently counting the breaths out loud for me as I struggled to draw steady breaths in and out.
That was over six months ago, but I’d adopted it since as a strategy for addressing my anxiety. Scientifically, anxiety can be reduced by doing something as simple as taking deep breaths. Doing so sends oxygen and carbon dioxide throughout our bodies and to the brain, calming the sympathetic nervous system’s flight-or-fight response monitored by activating the parasympathetic nervous system’s relax response. I strained to focus on my breath, ignoring the thoughts running across my mind as I tried to slow my heartrate. The siren still echoed vaguely, whether in my head or reality I wasn’t sure, as I wondered what tragedy awaited it, what circumstances had possibly led someone to have to call an ambulance, to want to summon precious healthcare workers, to invite these servants into their potentially infected homes, to expose themselves to whatever germs might linger at the hospital. Did they have it? It occurred to me that perhaps this wasn’t a call for an ambulance, delivering someone fatally ill or injured so they could just maybe be saved, but instead the police responding to some crime. Who, then, would commit a crime? Now, under a shelter-in-place order, allowed out only for essential activities, who was venturing outside to commit crimes? I lost myself thinking of all those who might feel they had to resort to that, all of those impossibly struggling, with no hope of anything better than the risk of committing a crime.
I looked down as I walked, the green of front lawns providing a kind solace from the leafless brown trees, the overcast and grey sky, the dark windows and empty streets. Small flowers were beginning to bud, tiny little dots of purple and blue in the soil next to the sidewalk. I had begun to cling to these small signs of life, the stark color and freshness of a newly budding March flowers.
I snapped a picture of these flowers, and the other ones I saw, too. I noticed small white blossoms amidst thick, dark green leaves in front of our house when we left for the first time in a few days, right after we starting knowing how bad this would be, at the beginning of the social distancing and extra caution, but before real danger or panic. After two or maybe three days of tuning into daily press conferences and reading articles and walking into the living room to a different roommate in tears, I emerged from the safety of our home, glancing to my left, and spotted the flowers that had certainly, definitely not been there the last time I had looked, the last time I had been outside, probably walking back from a class, in person, thinking about how distant this pandemic still felt. I love flowers, but I’m terrible at their names, it having been something I’ve never really studied at just expect to inherently know. I didn’t know what these small white flowers on my front lawn were called, so in my head, I named them coronas, their blossoming inherently tied to another new dawn, one entirely different, changing the world and how we live in it, when we realized there was a fatal threat lurking around every corner. The world felt dystopian, apocalyptic. But flowers still bloomed, it seemed, and so I knew life was still here.
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PANDEMIC ANXIETY
I’ve been afraid of the next pandemic for a few years now. Plagued by insomnia one night in the dark, cuddled in a fetal position with my phone in the twin bed of my dorm room, I scrolled through social media and news stories, cross-referencing and googling myself deeper into the black hole. I recall vividly reading a story about the inevitability of the next pandemic. I have recently scoured the internet, trying to find the exact article, trusting my memory to recognize one of trillions of articles that have likely crossed the surface of my phone screen. It could be this one, but I, of course, can’t be certain—memories, after all, are the great liars.
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The unhinged growth of consumerism, capitalism, everything, really, have catastrophically altered the environment, nearly to a point of no return. This existential threat is gradual, feels long off and difficult to comprehend for some, not deemed threatening or worthy enough for sufficient change by those in charge. Something as indiscriminately devastating as a global pandemic is not something most people were prepared for.
I, on the other hand, found myself in a surprisingly good position. To explain why I felt this way, I think I need to explain the paradoxical of myself, my anxieties, etc. Anxiety is, perhaps obviously, quite a prominent part of my life. It’s been that way for as long as I can remember, but especially so in life as I most vividly remember it, in late high school and throughout college. My increasing awareness of psychology and mental health has accompanied an increasing feeling that the way I feel and think is not, actually, so normal. I’ve spent years feeling at odds with my so-called “potential”; the childhood of above average intelligence and intellectual curiosity, and consistently high test results coupled with a brooding underlying feeling that no matter what, I didn’t quite feel right, couldn’t quite do what I expected or hoped or dreamed of being able to do. These were thoughts and feelings that I kept reserved for mostly myself, and occasionally select friends closest to me, silently insistent, convinced, that I was not emotional.
I finally decided to see a therapist as I began my junior year of college. I had spent the summer recovering from what had at a time seemed like a potentially life-ending heartbreak, the deepest depression one could feel. I came back to campus expecting my anxiety to shed with my joy about being back with my friends, and at school, but it didn’t. When I skipped activities I would have normally loved to sit in bed, reading or watching TV because of how anxious I felt about confronting these problems, I decided to confront the mental health struggles I had undeniably been really struggling with for most of my life, and found my first therapist. She diagnosed me with Generalized Anxiety Disorder and after a few months of therapy, I felt relieved by the comfort of a diagnosis, by my ability to start therapy despite categorizing myself as a person for whom therapy simply was not for. I left for my semester abroad in Madrid a month into my new antidepressant prescription, enthusiastic that all my problems that had previously seemed overwhelmingly insurmountable and unique were actually caused by a disorder concurrently suffered by almost seven million Americans every year. It could all be solved with a little therapy and an SSRI, and the invisible weights holding me back felt a little lighter. How silly I had been, to suffer when the solution was this easy.
And so I found, it was, in fact, not that easy. I moved into the tiny new apartment in a place where no one spoke English, lugging my suitcases up the four flights of stairs in the elevator-less building. My new medicine lessened my anxiety, but not without a simultaneous numbing and clarifying effect. With my diminished anxiety, I was increasingly aware of how much I struggled to focus, which I had previously attributed to my anxiety. I started to feel impulsive, like my ability to make reasoned choices had decreased along with my anxiety, too.
I got back to America, successfully surviving my semester abroad in one piece. I got a new therapist, and a psychiatrist too, who switched my medicine. After a while, my therapist asked me if I had ever considered ADHD as the cause of my attention deficits. I faltered—once, in high school, I told my mom I thought I might have ADHD. She shrugged, and told me to add it to the hypothetical list of things to speak to my pediatrician about that only seemed to exist in her mind. I did, and my doctor brushed it off—“I mean, you could get tested, but I really don’t think you would be as successful as you are or doing so well in school if you had ADHD,” my doctor told me, and I felt guilty for pathologizing the human experience, for feeling like what I experienced what somehow special and different than everyone else when it wasn’t really, when I really was one of the lucky ones.
As the summer passed, I soon found myself in the office of a neuropsychologist, undergoing cognitive and behavioral testing to determine if I had ADHD. I remember sitting in the room, two hours into tedious tasks and assessments, clicking through the last task. It was on a laptop, the kind of task that serves to bore you, to get you used to clicking a certain key and then changes, just to see if it can catch you, and the girl administrating the tests had told me to finish it and bring it out with me when I was done. It was stretching out endlessly, and I remember thinking to myself, anyone would find this boring. No one in the world could possibly not find this boring… what was I doing, taking an ADHD test? Why did I insist on bestowing conditions and deficits upon myself, when I was really fine, more than fine? Maybe I just needed to contend with the fact that I wasn’t as smart as I was raised to think I was. Here I was, the embodiment of privilege, the white girl from Manhattan who went to a specialized high school and paid out-of-state tuition for a degree at the University of Michigan, and I was now there, trying to find a privileged excuse for why I am not better, to excuse the shortcomings that less privileged people are just blamed for.
A week later, I went back to get my results. Well, you were right; you have ADHD, the doctor began, and I felt relieved that at the very least, I was not a malingerer, a user of a system already built to advantage me.
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I spent years anxious about the next pandemic, waiting for it to happen. So much so that when it did happen, I did not feel the shock and disbelief that everyone around me did. I felt, unfortunately, like I had been right, another time of many when I thought or said something I found objective, and learned that others live in a reality dictated by different rules.
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I read on Twitter that the reason why some people with chronic anxiety are actually doing well is because the world is not as certain as most people think it is. Anxiety is debilitating, holding its victims back from feeling at peace when everything is peaceful, from feeling like something bad is bound to come soon. But suddenly, when the myth of certainty is exposed as a falsity, the realities that were concrete dissolve into non-existence, as if they hadn't been set for our entire lives. When everyone else cannot believe how everything has gone wrong, cannot fathom how this has happened, I finally feel a bitter moment of peace, selfishly relishing in the fact that the things I expected this all along, and now I have one less thing to be anxious about.
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