Your Pandemic Score Card (No Cheating)

You may be doing better than you think — unless you’ve taken an axe to your spouse.

Whenever I check the morning’s news, I see little but doom and gloom. Cases are up, prospects are down, everybody’s complaining about something. The president says we don’t love him enough, workers from home say they eat too much, a frightening spike in maskdebating, especially among people quarantining alone, has church ladies clutching their pearls.

Now, I yield to no one in my admiration of Sherry McGuinn. Her fearless reporting on the latest in skincare therapy is a boon to all women of a “certain age.” The trauma of hiding her ruby red lips under a face-covering in these fraught times helps us all go on.

However, I fear Ms. McGuinn may have stepped a bit too far over the line in her screed against the Imposter Syndrome this morning. I fully support her call to buck up and suck it up as we face life’s onslaught of daunting challenges.

But, I ask myself, has she, by shining a light on the questionable practice of boasting of our superior Impostering, simply given us one more thing about which to self-condemn?

Surely, these times give us enough reasons to doubt ourselves, to question our skills and talents. Do we really need one more? Ms. McGuinn wants to take away the underpinning of any navel-gazing session, the conclusion that, by some amorphous measurement out there in the cosmos, we’ve come up short and no achievement or effort can change that.

Then what would we write about?

If we look back on ordinary times, the race to see who’s more of an imposter seems like a parlor game. Now, it seems like a side effect of the virus. But how do we measure a winner in pandemic-rocking when we don’t even have a yardstick?

To answer this question, I devised a simple test to discover our PQ (pandemic quotient). Who doesn’t like a test to quantify our talents and skills that we can wave self-righteously in the faces of the idiots who leave nasty comments on our articles, or housemates who protest that we leave more than our share of dirty dishes in the sink every evening?

Take this test and see how you score.

1. You haven’t cut your hair in six months (not even the fringe bald guys get around their necks).

20 points

(Deduct 30 points if you snuck out to get your do done when nobody was looking.)

Add 5 points for every time you gave yourself a self-inflicted injury known as “I cut it myself and should have left it alone.” After all, we’re a compassionate bunch.

2. You haven’t stood closer than six feet to any human outside the peeps in your household.

20 points.

Deduct 5 points for every time you’ve snuck out to party with people, “who promised they don’t have the virus.”

3. You thank every essential worker/delivery person putting their life on the line who allows you to stay home and stay safe.

20 points.

Deduct 5 points every time you’ve complained they are late, inefficient, or rude, or the sanitation workers wake you up too early in the morning banging the cans now that you’re a) unemployed, b) WFH and can sleep-in.

(Okay, you don’t have a job, and they do, but read the part where it says they are putting their lives on the line and don’t bother me with petty sh*t.)

4. You’re still talking in an “inside voice” to all your family members/housemates with whom you’ve sheltered-in-place.

20 points.

Deduct 5 points for every time you’ve started a fight because someone asked if you were going to eat a third helping of ice cream after dinner again. And then you found out they were only checking for the Instacart list.

Deduct 10 points if you were eating your third helping of ice cream after breakfast. But only if you started that fight.

Deduct 15 points for every member of your household you’ve physically harmed since the SIP began. And don’t give me BS about how they walked into your room while you were in the shower and “borrowed” your last cute tank top and got their stinky perfume all over it that won’t come out in the wash.

We’ve all got a hardluck story these days, but we don’t take a meat cleaver to our loved ones over nothing.*

*Read exceptions to “nothing” at the end of the article.

4. You’ve signed up for daily live-streaming workouts from your gym.

20 points.

Deduct 5 points for every live-streaming exercise subscription you’ve canceled.

Add 5 points for every Zoom exercise session you did with a friend just to keep their spirits up.

5. You’ve cleaned out and purged at least one drawer or closet that hadn’t been organized since Methuselah was a lifeguard.

20 points for each closet or drawer.

Deduct five points if you ordered a new line of loungewear that broke the limit on your credit card so you’d look cool on your Zoom calls, adding to the already crap-filled closet.

6. You’ve learned at least one lesson from this trying time. You hope it will make you a better person.

20 points.

If you’ve said, f**k it, I’m doing whatever I want, you’ll still get 20 points. Sometimes lessons come later, and you’ll need those points. I read that on KarmaIsABitch.com.

7. You’ve obeyed the recommendations to stay safe and avoid catching or spreading the virus, and so far, you’ve survived.

5,307,486 points (because, no matter what, that’s the big win for everyone)

Add 5 points if you obeyed the rules and caught it anyway.

If you caught it because you blathered on about rights and this being a free country, we hope you’ll recover without long-term health issues.

Not because we care about your health at this point. You can read, can’t you? But we don’t want you mucking up the health care system that is already stressed beyond anyone’s imaginings. And by the way, stay after class. We need to have a talk.

And a last point …

If you’re a healthcare worker on the front lines …

You get an automatic six zillion points. No deductions, no matter what else you do.

So, does that make you feel better? Where else can you get a seven-figure score no matter what kind of dirt-bag you’ve been? If you just come out of this alive, we’ll talk about the rest later.

For those of you who end up with a minus score on this test, I give up.

I came up with this quiz a few days ago while lamenting the fact that I’d probably lost my badass status. I’d foundered on the shores of inactivity instead of my once badass productivity. I wasn’t sure I still had those biceps I bragged about two months ago. That iron won’t pump itself on its own, you know.

Sure, I did the basics and met my obligations and kept my spirits at least above water. But otherwise, nothing to write home about, especially when I realized I’d lost my followers and $$$ on this platform because, for reasons I still haven’t figured out, I hit the wall.

So, I started down the road of blaming myself for not doing a better job of sticking with my program during my quarantine, one that I thought would have ended months ago.

One of the good things about being my age is that I learn my lessons sooner rather than later. I realized that just coming to grips with the uncertainty of it all was enough to send anyone into a spiral. That cut my negativity off at the pass.

The point of this quiz is to demonstrate that we are stressed beyond anyone’s limits, and yet we go on.

We go on with the extra “Covid 15” around our middle.

We go on with recurring nightmares.

We go on with bouts of depression.

We go on knowing our children are losing out.

We go on worry about where our next meal is coming from (see above note about children).

We worry about jobs, rent, health, our loved ones, our own sanity.

And yet we go on.

For those who have lost someone in their circle during this time, we all need to give them our extra points.

It will take a long time to understand the full toll this pandemic has taken on our world. It’s easy to quantify the cases and deaths. The job losses, the businesses shuttered for good.

But I’ve yet to see a scale that measures the emotional toll of living through this nightmare.

And lacking a yardstick, we’re left to our own devices, and inevitably, many of us come up short. How fair is that?

Some of us do better than others. That’s the way it is in life, so there’s no point in measuring ourselves against some ideal way of handling a crisis for which nothing in our lives fully prepared us.

We’re doing the best we can. If we could do this differently, we would.

Throughout history, governments have made decisions that were not in the best interests of their citizens, often at a terrible cost. Nazism, the Irish Famine, the Trail of Tears, slavery for starters.

Sadly, we’re caught in a crisis with the wrong leaders who will play politics with our lives. We’re all paying the price for that, and will for a long time to come.

For that, we deserve every point in the book.

But for now, let’s just give ourselves a break.

We’ve had six months of this, so let’s take what learning we’ve gleaned and use it to help ourselves and our loved ones make it through one more day, one more week, and keep on keeping on until this nightmare is over.

And give ourselves a huge pat on the back while we’re at it.

I’m an editor and writer on Medium with Top Writer status. I’m also an editor for the publication, Rogues Gallery. I’ve published 55 titles on Amazon and edit for private clients. If you’d like to hire me as your editor for fiction, non-fiction, or business writing, please contact me here. If you’d like to read more of my work on Medium, click here to sign up for my newsletter. Thank you for reading.