My friend loves horror films. She seems an unlikely candidate. Her hair is dyed electric banana to compliment her wardrobe of whimsical pastels and patterns. Once, on a dark and stormy night, I arrived at her house with wet socks. She went to the bedroom and retrieved a pair of pinks socks with an avant-garde blue swirl that looped up the ankle. I looked at it, dumbfounded, before she answered my curiosity: “it’s a sneezing nose”.
At some point in that evening, between the rain playing overbearing ASMR on the roof shingles and stray cats meowing at the back door, my friend said it would be a perfect night to watch a scary movie. I asked her why she liked to be terrified in such deliberate and manipulative ways. She said that most of the time she moved through the world with varying levels of anxiety – at least at a horror movie marathon it guaranteed everyone would be at the same level of anxiety as her for one evening.
This is how I feel about COVID-19.
The first week of the Australian lockdown was – for me – pure exhilaration. I realised early on that the feeling was similar to when I was diagnosed with MS. After a slow build of tension the problem was diagnosed and there was a release from blind uncertainty into things you could and couldn’t control. There was urgency to life and a desire to live well. I channeled the hand washing energy into cleaning my bedroom to a sublet ready standard. I played basketball down at the local court every morning – the joyous, pumping soundtrack on my bluetooth speaker brought a smile to the joggers and dog walkers. I was at my writing desk every day after not being there for months. I wrote 5k words on a project I’d long ruminated over. I even submitted two arts grants (!)
I needed to connect and re-connect with people. I talked to different family or close friends every day. We used video chat (because we need to see faces now). Similar to my MS diagnosis, there was only one thing to talk about. Any conversation that managed to veer away from COVID-19 was swiftly brought back to the all-encompassing state of things. So much so that after a week I organised to talk to people on the proviso that we wouldn’t talk about COVID-19. It always turned out to be an empty promise. Hopeful, but empty.
Circumstances simplified life. To geo-locate me you only had to look at home, my desk space or the basketball court. I could tolerate the 5am starts to get on the Centrelink website, or when someone in the library sneezed the frightened jump on to the top shelf. This after all, was the low-level anxiety I lived with all the time.
I was soon careful not to share my exuberance for the collective “new normal” with people who found themselves in a different situation (although I’m potentially immune-compromised I am without debt or dependents and have some savings in the bank i.e. not on the margins). Where others might have been feeling their way through the COVID-19 fog I was familiar with the landscape – an experienced navigator. Professor George Jelinek, who developed the Overcoming MS program I follow, articulated the familiarity I felt:
For me, one of the hallmarks of the OMS community we have created is the capacity we have developed to maintain our hope in the face of uncertainty. I can think of few other conditions where this matters more. Most people in the general community cannot imagine how they might cope in the face of not knowing from day to day whether they would wake up with some new symptom of serious neurological damage. That uncertainty would not be tolerable for most people. But out of our shared adversity, that is precisely the strength that we have cultivated.
After a week my experience told me I needed to slow down. The flip side of exhilaration is anxiety and despair. On a late-night podcast with Alice Fraser, neuroscientist Ash Ranpura described anxiety as “a free-floating sense of dread, unattached and formless”. I have known it well and could sense the monster lurking in the shadows.
I took a day off. I didn’t play basketball or go into my desk. I stayed at home and did as my meditation practice often told me to do (not that I’d meditated consistently in months). For a day I would… just notice.
The low-level stress woke me up at 5am and every noise my well-meaning housemates made throughout the morning was unbearable. In the afternoon I lowered the blinds and watched a bad movie in the dark. A thriller no less! When the credits rolled I felt the adrenaline leach out of me. Anxiety, which adrenaline had dampened down, began to bloom into a noxious, debilitating flower in my gut.
I felt shame. Why did it require a pandemic for me to get back into writing? (Ignoring the fact that I’ve slowly been getting back into the practice the last few months) Why couldn’t I give myself that time? Why wasn’t I thinking of others, helping others? And a million other questions that outmatched my imagination and reduced down to
How long will this go on for?
How long will this go on for?
How long will this go on for?
I didn’t know if I was cross-examining my own anxiety, the collective anxiety, or the crown virus itself.
This lasted an hour. Only an hour, but a long, lonely hour. I asked for and had expected it and was still surprised. I was also prepared to take action. Living with the uncertainty of MS for 9 years has prepared me well. COVID-19 inspires a moveable feast of uncertainty. It’s a horror movie without a director.
I took hold of the things in my control. I opened the blinds and looked out at the flickering red lights of the city skyline. I went for a walk in the evening air around the lamp-lit park. If the monster was lurking in the shadows it was quiet now. I came home and ate broccoli and kale, with soba, toasted sesame seeds and garlic-infused olive oil.
All of these things are poison for the flower of anxiety!
All of these things are in our control.*
* “This is all about you and me taking control of the virus, rather than the virus taking control of us.” – Dr Norman Swan, ABC 7:30
D A V E M A N E Y 