In Which Our Writer Feels Guilty for Taking a Day Off
After more than two years of dodging COVID it finally caught me. I tested positive Saturday and have been in my bed since.
There is something ironic and fitting about catching the virus thousands of miles from home, not in my hometown, NYC, the “epicenter of COVID,” but beside the snow-capped mountains of the Pacific coastline.
The symptoms have been fairly mild, but enough to put me out of commission for a few days. Ben and I are physically distancing, which hasn’t been easy in our small apartment, but we’re fortunate to have two bedrooms to sleep in. Apart from one 45-minute visit where we watch television together — both masked, me near an open window — we’ve stayed in separate rooms and I spray down any surface I touch with rubbing alcohol. Our doorknobs have likely never been this clean.
Historically, it’s taken getting sick for me to slow down enough to really check in and assess how I’m feeling. My mother and I like to talk about our tendency to plow through things, to just keep moving and get things done. For a long time, I was proud of this ability to turn on autopilot and BE PRODUCTIVE, going full throttle until I burn out, only giving myself a chance to breathe when I come down with a bug. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned just how harmful that behavior is and have developed a healthier relationship with productivity, learning to meditate and take time out for vacation, but there is nothing like the time out I allow myself when my body says no more.
It’s been quite a year already. I nearly broke my toe in the Bahamas. My mother was hospitalized. My dear cousin died suddenly. The next day, my grandmother’s sister died. I got COVID.
This all comes as I try to make sense of what life is meant to be in the shadow of so many deaths over the past several years.
Each incident felt intense and painful in its own way and, strangely, each also brought moments of grace and beauty.
- It felt good to let my best friend care for me in the Bahamas. We’d meant for the vacation to be restful and my joke that I wouldn’t mind using a scooter to zip around the resort, like the man with the broken foot I saw in the hotel casino, became prescient as I was wheeled through the lobby in a wheelchair.
- I felt Oscar’s assuring presence in the full moon beaming down on me and my brother as we tried to find my mother at the hospital. The reflection of the sun on the moon’s surface in the dark snow-covered parking lot, beamed a message from Oscar that all would be well. I cannot convey the sense of peace I felt. My mother is now healing.
- I held the beautiful faces and strong hands of the women who have held my family together for decades as we celebrated and mourned the life of my cousin. It had been years since I’d been in their energy, our lives separated by thousands of miles. There were tears and unexpected laughter.
- I am ever-more mindful of those we lost to this illness. I am grateful for vaccines. I am grateful for this life.
This is the core of resilience, being able to see everything that experiences can bring us, whether welcome or unwanted. Resilience is the act of being willing to let the fullness of life wash over us and receive.
At the depths of my suffering, I have felt angry for all of the resilience required, getting up over and over again and then greeting the mundaneness of life, like a Matryoshka doll nestled inside of one reality after another, accepting that it all goes on. It just keeps going on.
At the root of the resentment are seeds of pain, the need for everyone to validate that getting up again is not easy, that I need help, patience from others, that I struggle with finding patience for myself. It turns out that the resentment I have felt is not about resilience itself, it is that I have not made time to take care of myself, to heal, and often experience a desperate desire to bypass the pain by just getting back to being productive and not feeling so damn much.
During our living room visiting hour last night, Ben and I watched the season premier of Russian Doll, the loopy existential show about time warps. In it, Natasha Lyonne asks her time traveling counterpart Charlie Barnett if he is happy. Barnett responds with little affect, “I’m fine, I think this is just what life feels like.”
Ben and I busted out laughing, a truer line never delivered. I guess we’re all just a little resentful these days.
