It's a bizarre sociological phenomenon. Extract from your world the nay-sayers and anti-maskers and you find yourself surrounded by people who are afraid and rules that are meant both to manage that fear and to manage a public health crisis.
I read an Atlantic article recently that dealt with reasons why some people hide their COVID diagnosis from those in their world, which I found fascinating. One of those reasons is the idea that somehow to be sick is to be lacking in virtue. If you are sick, something must be wrong with you. If you are well and strong, all hail the conquering hero.
Well, I'll tell you. I am a healthy person--sick maybe once a year, if that. I am also a rule-follower, which means that when my city and my place of employment started issuing recommendations for COVID safety, I was all in. I was careful. I was safe.
It didn't matter.
I came down with the plague near the beginning of November. I maintain that it happened on election night, when a friend and I ventured out to our favorite hole-in-the-wall Mexican restaurant and then this man ended up spewing his political propaganda over us, unmasked, throughout our entire dinner. The symptoms started a few days later.
People ask me what it was like to have had COVID. The first thing I tell them is that while I can describe my experience, the most notable thing I've observed is that literally everyone who has had it has had a different set of symptoms. It is a weird, weird disease.
The hard part for me wasn't the illness--or even the fatigue, which yes, was awful, and took about 6 weeks to completely disappear.
What was hard was what came after.
When you first go back into society, people keep their distance. They aren't trying to be unkind, but they are afraid, and even when they know you're past your isolation, they don't really know that they are safe from you. You take a nap in your car because your office floor is hard and you're afraid people will be scared of your germs if you nap out in the open on a faculty lounge sofa.
Everyone else wears a mask to be safe, whereas you wear your mask to make them feel the illusion of safety.
You wish you had a sign (or a T-shirt) that said, "I've already had it" so that people would know they're safe around you.
You carry your documentation of diagnosis on a plane just in case a rule changes while you're traveling and you have to defend...something.
And even once these things pass, you realize that your world has changed and the way you view it has shifted. The world is hyper-focused on getting the vaccine (which yes, you'll get at some point, but where's the rush if you already have antibodies?) or staying vigilant against the virus, and you no longer worry about these things. You wear a mask to help others feel safe, and you social distance because, well, you like to do that anyway.
But being alive post-COVID comes with a different set of fears. Someone you know dies unexpectedly from a heart attack catalyzed by post-COVID inflammation that he didn't know he had. You get on the treadmill for the first time in months and all you can think is, I feel strong enough to do this, but what if that happens to me, too?
You take deep breaths, frequently, just to remind yourself that you can. You wonder if you will ever be able to sing, really sing, again, or whether you are destined for coughing fits to interrupt it for the rest of your life.
You feel grateful it wasn't worse. And you didn't infect anyone else (that you know of). You find a renewed purpose in life because you could have died and didn't and that has to mean something.
But you are alone. Even when you aren't. Because relatively few people get what it's like to be on the other side of this.
This is being alive in the aftermath.
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