Living Through History, Part I

It's been almost seven years since I posted anything to this blog, but now feels as good a time as any to document my experiences as a teacher, because we're living through unprecedented and scary times, and as witnesses with access to documentation abilities, why not? So. Here goes. 

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I cried in the shower tonight. 

I was doing okay for most of the day today; better than the previous couple of days, with this huge looming existential thing approaching in the distance of all of our lives. I kept myself productive today.  I did school things, I did house things, I did self things. I mostly stayed distracted. 

But in the shower tonight, by candlelight and spa music from Pandora, I let my brain and my thoughts go a little too soft; too slippery; too scary.  The thing that got me this time?*** The thought of actual quarantine, as opposed to social distancing.  What if one of us gets this? Jack is all I have right now for actual human contact, and the thought of losing that one and only human I'll likely be able to touch and snuggle with and watch TV with and talk to in person for the foreseeable next months just slipped in there and devastated me.  Again, here, typing it out, it's scary.  And I know it wouldn't be forever, but the prospect of it kicked me in the gut just now and so I'm going to wallow a little in the Not Okay.  I did a good job today avoiding that dark part of my brain, and in a few minutes, I'll snuggle down into bed with my Switch and spend my last minutes of wakefulness tonight playing Breath of the Wild.  But at this moment, I'm going to let the tears run down my cheek thinking about all that's yet to come with this pandemic thundering through our lives. 

*** Yesterday, it was All Of It. It all caught up to me.  But the tipping point was thinking about the possibility of not spending any more time with my Speech and Debate seniors. And this crushes me. Absolutely, wholly, and completely. Day before, it was an episode of The Nanny.  At the end of the episode, Maxwell shares a video tape with the children with footage of their deceased mom.  And I thought about losing my own mom to this virus and absolutely lost it. 

I'm sure I'm not alone.  Actually, I know I'm not alone.  I'm talking to friends every day, and it sounds like we all just rise and fall throughout the day like the lazy waves at a low surf day in the ocean Some minutes, hours, you're up, buoyed by your eighth episode of Top Chef that day, or by your tiny child's drawings, or by the second piece of leftover birthday cake you've eaten day (... two of those might be me...), and some minutes, hours, you're down, sinking into despair wondering whether life ever goes back to normal; wondering how this all ends; wondering when I can have dinner at my parents' again without the paralyzing fear of infecting them with something that could kill them. 

This was maybe a bad idea to try to write these thoughts down because now I'm a mess. But it doesn't do any good to pretend like everything is fine.  Humans aren't built for isolation.  I'm as isolated as it gets; I don't mind being home for days at a time and spend my summers just as happily on my couch watching reruns of TV as I do in the winter.  That's by choice, though. This doesn't feel like it is. That's going to be the hardest part of all of this, and probably why people are ignoring advice and directives to avoid each other: because it's terribly, objectively, wrenchingly hard to voluntarily commit to isolation. 

I hope everyone else out there is doing what they can to maintain some semblance of normal. I was sort of hoping writing stuff down would be helpful; that remains to be seen, as I sit here in my ugly-cry finest, wondering what the hell I was thinking. 

That's the thing about living through history, though. It isn't always going to be pretty.  It's not all ticker tape parades and celebratory fireworks. Sometimes it's death and destruction and grief and fear; that's where we're at right now.  I just hope when we come out the other side, things change. They have to.  Otherwise, thousands of people will have died from this for no reason.  Entire lives were upended for nothing. People lost jobs for nothing; people figured out overnight how to do their jobs online for nothing; but most of all, again, people will have died for nothing.