Who would’ve thought that our generation(s) will see a pandemic? I think many have shared this idea of writing personal accounts of what / how it feels to go through the pandemic ..wherever you are.
I live in northern nj and work in the city (NYC). here, I just want to log how everyday of the week has felt/been since starting to work from home this month.
each day, I wake up having slept 6-8h and feeling hopeful, refreshed and well-rested. start my day by ritualistic pot of coffee, which used to be limited to weekends pre-covid. now, though, everyday is the same, more or less. so I pour myself a cup of coffee, and start my day by reading emails, then slack, then twitter.
since I wake up pretty early, slack is usually quiet and there aren’t any pressing emails to get to either. twitter, however, is always chock full of information. I quickly scroll through mentions/messages and then go on to look at the feed.. usually stop at the top 50 tweets. during this time, I see dozens of covid19 related tweets with mixtures of paper reviews, technology, policy, stats, so on and so forth. gradually, the sunnyness of my day starts to get... cloudy.
come noon, I have been making serious efforts at being productive. now this can be a variety of things, depending on what day it is. for instance, if it is tuesday morning - I am most likely reading papers for the zoom/JC for immunology. other days, I look through data, write things down. I work a little bit on that OKRs for the month. I go back and forth working on my to-do lists and see what I could squeeze in before afternoon. come afternoon, though, I can’t help myself and go look at the covid19 stats on ny/nj. and then things progress to blues.. well, navy blues.
as the day progresses, i have a meal or two.. i try to listen to some music. maybe even watch some tv. i find ways to distract myself. be it papers, facts, conversations. but, my shoulders feel heavy, my appetite seems sparse. my spirit seem damped. i try to over analyze every sniffle, every random cough, every feeling of heavy heartedness to a symptom. i take my temperature. i log things in a calendar. and i hope for the best.
so, if you are like me. if you never understood anxiety and now are suddenly coping with small or large doses of it for yourself or for your family/friend. if you are someone who doesn’t like to do the touchy feely in your day to day. if you are a biologist and in some ways feel like you have been training your entire life to understand and do this. if you are feeling that heaviness on your shoulders.
then, you are not alone. you are everyone else.
we minimize conversations in public. we wash our hands before touching faces. we observe physical distance, but we keep our hearts and ears open. we write ourselves and others notes of our life because decades from now, when we are healthy, older and possibly greyer, we will remember the time we all pulled through. we will sit in the comfort of our future, flip through these pages from history and time-travel back to a time where humanity was still timeless. and love, even love in the time of Corona.. was ubiquitous and omnipresent.
