Pandemic Anxiety Created a Crystal-Clear Sense of What I Needed to be Doing

After half a lifetime of feeling not good enough the fear and anxiety of living in the pandemic washed away all that wasn’t important and showed me what truly was.

We only had seven cases in the Iowa City area last spring when reports of the spreading Novel Coronavirus began to pop up in the news. However, I’d been keeping an eye on China and Italy and my baby neck hairs were already raised.

On Wednesday the University of Iowa announced, like other universities in the US, that the weeks following the upcoming spring break, we’d be going digital, the dorms were closed for everyone who was capable of returning home, but in-class sessions were expected to resume before the end of the semester.

Thursday, in class, the flight, fight, or freeze response gripped me and my inner voice went all panic-chatter. Masks were thought to do nothing so no one was wearing one. Rationally I realized that of a population of 80,000 it was unlikely that any of us in the classroom had come into contact with the seven known infected, but fear isn’t rational is it?

Any one of my classmates could have been infecting the whole room, including myself. Just the day before I had met with a student in person who’d flown back from a conference in California. The conference officials had attempted to keep things safe and encouraged hand washing and no contact (the student explained how weird it was to tap elbows with colleagues).

Had she been infected? Did she infect me? Am I infecting this class!? Where’d they all come from; who’d they been in contact with? Worse, who were they going home to?! A classmate sat next to me, his wife a high risk case, he was heavily disinfecting before entering their house at the end of the day. And a friend in Chicago had already pulled her five-yr-old out of school because he has severe respiratory issues.

So my inner voice was shouting: should any of us even be here?!

The instructor, an old school art prof with the reserve and distance of a well-practiced researcher, broke my internal spiral by chatting casually about how bizarre the circumstances were, how upset her daughter was at missing a slam poetry competition she’d qualified for and having to move back to the confines of her parents’ four walls in her first year of freedom.

She, the prof, merrily told us that since everyone was going to be home, they may take a holiday!

I know this professor could not have predicted the ways in which the virus would shut down the world, cause millions of deaths, or how long it would affect us all, but even then, back in those seats, with only a few cases in town, I thought to myself how absurd this woman sounds and how naïve the university is being.

But, outside of some well-informed epidemiologists (for that is their job), no one could have predicted the devastating outcome, and it was the uncertainty that held me in its grip (as it did/does many). The uncertainty of how the virus spread, of how to shield myself from it, of what decisions might be made that would render me powerless to protect myself, such as the university insisting we return to classes as they originally suggested (or later on, removing mask mandates).

Going to the grocery store alone in those early days caused complete and utter meltdown, the fact I managed to go in at all without collapsing astonishes me.

Anxiety is part of the autonomic nervous system, wired long before we bipeds had the ability to form language. In order to keep ourselves safe against predatory animals (that were much larger than they are today!) and neighboring tribes (though I like to think of the very early days as community efforts to share food and increase survival against weather and predators, but I’m an optimist), our brains had to register danger before it had consciously processed the data coming in.

It’s primal, if you will. A twig snaps, a shadow moves, and before we’re fully aware of what we’ve seen or heard, our adrenaline kicks in. It’s heightening our sense of smell, our sight is sharper, our muscles are tense and ready to fire as the body prepares to run or fight (unless you’re me and your first response is to freeze like a damned bunny hoping to direct the predator’s attention away from my bunny friends moving to safety. Good for the tribe, bad for me…)

And, of course we know, thanks to Charles Darwin and subsequent research, that those whose brains had this ability, managed to survive potential threats more frequently and reproduce, thus passing along this bit of helpful DNA.

Unless it’s 2020.

Where there are no large animals, just an unseen, highly contagious and life-threatening virus spreading through the world. I can’t see it, hear it, or smell it, not at the grocery store or in a classroom.

There’s no way to outrun it and reach safety, there’s nothing to fight. And panic can’t be rationalized away, but in this case, there was very little rational information to even give it a go. In other words, there was no way to shake off the danger and relieve the panic.

So here’s my body, adrenaline pumping through my veins, internal diatribe rolling, every single time I left the house. The only way of both keeping myself safe and reducing the extreme anxiety was to dive in my little bunny hole, wrap myself in a blanket next to a hot cuppa, and hunker down — I’m not bothered to ever leave the house again, actually, so if someone could leave some groceries at my door, that’d be great thanks!

I attended my last class before spring break that Thursday afternoon like I was on some hardcore uppers, I don’t know what it looked like to my classmates, but on the inside, I was bursting out of my seat; my body felt like it was simultaneously constricting and expanding in equal measure until finally we were set free.

I went home and locked the door.

I made myself a cup of earl grey, grabbed a blanket, and settled in. First: I unfollowed every single person in my Facebook feed (a trick a friend used years ago as a step to deactivate her FB account for good — Facebook has made it surprisingly easy to do).

I knew I wouldn’t be able to stop myself from logging in in isolation, but that didn’t mean I needed to be subjected to other folks’ panic, the divisive arguments that were sure to ensue, or the fake facts. If I wanted to see what friends were posting, I had to go to their wall, FB circa 2006.

Second, I closed out of iMessage and started making phone calls. And not just to my grandma and my mum. I called everyone I could think of. Family members I see less frequently; my sister who, like, only really calls me when mum doesn’t answer; friends scattered across the country; and even a friend in England.

And the final thing I did instinctively, without really thinking about it or debating whether or not it was something I SHOULD be doing or if I had TIME for it or if there were any other things on the To-Do that took priority (in fact, I threw out To Do lists in general): I watched spring set it.

I ordered a hammock (all the cool kids already had one), installed it between the posts of the balcony above me, and watched the remnants of the snow melt from the backyard, the birds migrate into and out of town, the clouds pass shadows over our little residential hill, and the bud nubs on the neighbors’ trees grow into blooms and eventually leaves.

Creatively, none of the projects I was stressing about just a few days before mattered much, not that I had access to the studios or equipment to make any progress on them, but I did turn to my first creative endeavor: writing. A practice I’d struggled to maintain whenever I wasn’t in a writing program and a skill I’d felt incredibly incompetent at (no matter how many workshops I attended or creative writing degrees I’d earned).

I mostly wrote unwieldy little poetic prose blocks about my observations of the moon and the rain, a la Dorothy Wordsworth’s diaries, pieces I’ll probably never bother to work with, but were necessary nonetheless.

And here’s the thing: I spent years pondering different places I might live, the different kinds of ways I might pay the bills, the graduate programs I might apply to. I worried about all the should-dos and To-Dos and can-probably-dos.

I don’t know how many hours of my life I actively felt like a complete and utter failure for running into money issues or having to move home where I could be supported by my parents. I don’t think I even realized that I carried a consistent, low-level belief that in order to be a writer I literally had to be someone else, from somewhere else, doing other things.

And suddenly all that was gone. The overwhelming panic about COVID usurped all the other, long-held anxieties and I got on with the business of the present and the things that felt most urgent: slowing down, connecting with humans in the ways I could, and writing, not because there was a deadline, or because it was a clever idea or amazing phrasing, just because it was what I needed to do.

This is the second installment of a series on a journey out of academic burnout. Find the first installment here.