The COVID Rage
This Tuesday, I threw an adrenaline-spiked tantrum the likes of which I thought I had long left in the past. I’m a meditating adult now, goddamnit! When I get angry, I take deep breaths and go on walks. I journal. I phone a friend. So how did I find myself screaming at my dad, curling up into a ball on my bed and sobbing?
When I was younger, my sister nicknamed me “Katie Ka-Boom” after the Animaniacs cartoon character- a teenage girl who would explode into a fireball of anger at the slightest provocation.
Years of therapy and self-reflection later, I’ve learned to understand my childhood outbursts were the only way that I knew how to declare that something wasn’t right.
A boundary had been violated. I felt unsafe, uncomfortable, or invisible.
But without the vocabulary to eloquently express these feelings, I instead sounded the wail alarm, knocking down any poor soul in my path with my screaming, flailing small-framed ball of fury.
It turns out that COVID is a huge boundary violator. It doesn’t give one shit about our plans, about our safety, about how well-behaved we’ve been.
And for nine months, I’d been slowly accumulating COVID Rage, pushing it down deep.
In March 2020, when my COVID time clock began, my then-roommate and I hunkered down good. He made a complex diagram that represented every step we needed to take to safely execute our grocery run every two weeks. Sanitizer. Masks. Gloves. Wipe down the cart. Leave your phone in the car. Take only the essentials. Don’t touch anything you’re not going to buy. Don’t lean against anything. Avoid proximity to any human being. Sanitize again. Sanitize the groceries. Sanitize your soul.
The college class I had been teaching was immediately disbanded, students ungraciously kicked out of dorms, as I watched like an anxious mother hen. Several students sent me panicked emails about positive COVID tests, not yet knowing whether this meant certain death, or just a pesky flu. Another high-risk student had no option but to begin the days-long drive towards home, flying being too dangerous. Yet another made the trek back to Vietnam, reflecting on the whip lash of being a target of American anti-Asian racism, yet seeing how efficiently and calmly her home country managed the pandemic.
I swallowed the barrage of worries and injustices, and tried to keep my footing amidst the daily changes to COVID rules. Wipe all surfaces!! Never leave your house!! Don’t interact with any other humans, ever!! STAY CALM!!
By April, not much had changed. I defended my doctoral dissertation through Zoom, was congratulated through Zoom, and a couple of friends braved the back yard for a masked, distanced semblance of a celebration. In the back of my mind, I thought about how my family in Mexico had been so excited to come to my graduation. A graduation that was cancelled, a life-changing accomplishment dampened into just another Friday in April. I swallowed that one down, too.
The soggy celebrations kept piling up.
I accepted my first position as a salaried professor. I learned to pickle vegetables and bake bread. I moved to a new city and state. I accumulated a vast array of houseplant friends. I got really creative with Zoom socializing — birthday parties, happy hours, game nights, even dates.
I was being SUCH A GOOD CITIZEN!
And really, it wasn’t that bad — hadn’t I always wanted to spend more time in solitude, read all the books on my list, learn to cross stitch, spend time alone in nature? “I’m lucky”, I thought, “I’m privileged to be able to be safe, to work from home, to not have kids to homeschool, to know my rent can be paid and my insurance kept active”.
The news teemed with heartbreaking stories of families who had to mourn bodies carted into refrigerated trucks, while activists outcried the injustices of the very visible color lines this virus has exposed. In perspective, I was doing ok. And if I just avoided the news and kept inside my own little bubble, I was even better!
But the violations raged on.
We were asked to accept the impossible. To keep being good, even as more and more freedoms were stripped from us, as we became more and more uncomfortable, scared, unsafe.
Maybe that’s why so many of us un-melanated folks joined the Black Lives Matter protests of the summer. We finally started to accumulate enough of our own indignation to belatedly realize, “Oh shit, THAT’S what you’ve been telling us about since forever? Ok, my bad, just starting to see it now.” For our tardiness, I apologize.
By the fall, heightened adrenaline was a way of life. “Zoom fatigue” began to enter the academic vocabulary. Many of my friends had gotten COVID, including a family with three young kids, who spent two weeks in a collective fever, vomit, and diarrhea mess. And then things kept getting harder.
Mother hen once again, I watched a new semester’s worth of students be given the insurmountable task of socially distancing while being funneled into the inevitably social sphere of dorm and campus life[1].
Within two weeks, cases spiked, and my students cycled in and out of quarantine and isolation as different roommates took turns being exposed. All semester breaks were cancelled in an attempt to limit population movement, but in turn created an inescapable nightmare of nonstop online meetings. Online classes, online working groups, online conferences, online luncheons, online happy hours, all became part of a “normal work week”.
The pressure to keep safe, to keep isolated, to keep up, left me with migraines and back spasms, nightmares and moments of hopelessness. The discomfort I kept swallowing to protect me from COVID sickness was in turn making me a different kind of sick. A sickness of the soul, stemming from a life half lived under the promise that one day, I would get to fully exist again.
And then, as the weather turned colder, COVID started to creep closer, taking the lives of one, then another of my friends. I had lost other friends in Mexico during the summer wave, but these friends were just one state away — I’d seen them more recently, which made the loss seem that much more offensive. I wanted to scream “I’m right here, and I’m doing the best I can, and still, it isn’t enough”. Instead I cried alone, lit candles, journaled.
It was under this weight that I made the carefully calculated and agonizing decision to travel to Mexico for my six-week winter break. I know people who have travelled freely through the last nine months and emerged unscathed, and I’ve judged them silently for their irresponsibility while simultaneously masking my jealousy. I’ve watched frustratedly as friends and acquaintances took advantage of Mexico’s open borders to book themselves a quick vacation. I was bitter at the ease with which they could take a break from this reality, scared at the carefree way that they and their potentially infected selves violated the home I, in my mind, had been working so tirelessly, so selflessly, to protect by keeping myself isolated and alone.
With luggage packed to the gills with guilt, in early December, I boarded a plane to Mexico, violating all the rules I’d taught myself to live by for the last nine months. My mind was swirling with self-critique. How dare I take a break, when there are people who can’t? Who do I think I am, to even think of risking my family for my own self-centered joy? I armed myself with an N-95 mask that I wore religiously, sanitizer the holy water that would absolve me.
I distracted myself on the plane with movies, dutifully ignoring the suspicious coughs of fellow passengers. With the grace of a hungry squirrel, I shoved a tupperware’s worth of dinner into my face in the corner of an abandoned terminal gate during my layover, then quickly pulled my mask back up. The Mexico City airport was a chaotic mess of more people than I’d seen all year. I contorted in an airport bathroom to remove my potentially infected clothes, shoving them into a plastic bag to be washed immediately once we got home. When my sister picked me up at the airport, she sprayed down my luggage, and loaded me into the farthest recesses of the back seat. We arrived late into the night to my dad’s rural house, an hour and a half outside of Mexico City.
As I opened the door into the guest apartment — an old horse stable converted into two rooms right outside of the central house, I saw the Christmas lights and grocery goodies my dad and sister had prepared for my arrival. Exhausted, I realized it had been so very long since I’d let anyone take care of me.
I woke to a morning so specific to this place that I almost cried in relief. The way the dew smells as its warmed by the sun. The light layer of mist that glimmers on the surrounding fields in the foreground and shrouds the mountains in the background. The view of my dad through the kitchen window, warming up his morning coffee.
I spent the next few days in full quarantine rapture. I woke up without an alarm, and spent hours on my belly in the grass, watching the slow life of grasshoppers and ants. The internet was mercifully weak, a welcome excuse to avoid work. My dad would call periodically to check on me, and we’d talk on the phone, standing on opposite sides of the yard.
“Ok, this is good, everything will be ok. I made it. This year of difficulty, it was all worth it”, I thought to myself.
But then, bit by bit, my calm, slow, quarantine was punctured by the incessant *ding* of the family group text. My sister was replacing the windows to her apartment, and coordinating a flurry of workers (bubble violation!), while also serving as taxi to her roommate (unnecessary travel!), and some cousins who came into the mix (bubble violation!). My mom was coming into the city to see a dentist, a dermatologist, and a chiropractor (TRIPLE bubble violation!), and staying with my sister (bubble violation squared?). My dad, who I had counted on being safely isolated in the country with me, made plans to head to the city to help with the chaos.
No, no, no, no. This was too much.
The family was making too many plans. Didn’t they owe it to me to be more careful?? What about everything that I had sacrificed? All the moments alone, all the stress, and disappointments?
That night, I took advantage of my secluded conditions and my father’s poor hearing, and screamed into the expanse of my room.
The fates heard my call, and in the morning, plans came to a (literal) crashing halt. Just after leaving the house, my dad pierced his passenger side windshield by driving into the corner of a parked trailer. He was unharmed, but the car remains unfit for highway driving. I breathed a sigh of relief, believing that this would surely mean that everyone would slow down and follow the pandemic rules I’d held to so tightly.
Instead, the chaos continued, and the next night, my sister and cousins made an unexpected appearance to stay at my dad’s. They happily knocked on the window to my room, obliviously cheerful in their salutations, while I forced a smile. I was a fish trapped inside a tank, cringing as they tapped the glass. Within a few hours, the population of my safe quarantine space had tripled.
I tried to breathe, and tell myself that it would be ok.
But the next morning, as I started my routine, I texted my dad. I needed to post up in the yard close to the house, where the internet was stronger, to submit some end of semester grades. “Ok”, my dad texted, “but the builders are coming to do some repairs, and your cousin will be working on a project in the yard — so how much space do you actually need?”.
THAT. WAS. IT.
Katie Ka-boom took center stage, a caterwauling tirade about “violated bubbles and nobody cares and I’ve been so careful, and YOU’RE NOT EVEN TRYING!!!!”.
Whew.
The COVID rage had reached capacity, and my poor pa was the closest target.
A few hours and tears later, when I was once again able to string together coherent sentences, we mapped the source of my anger. As I narrated all of my accumulated fears, frustrations, and the extent of my emotional exhaustion, it became clear that we had been living in vastly different realities. By numbers, my current home state of Indiana has double the cases of Mexico City[2], and the United States reports almost thirteen times as many cases as Mexico. Being in the states for the past 9 months, I’d come to assume that “pandemic” (which in Greek translates to “all the people”) meant that we were all in this together, suffering in the same ways, all around the world. COVID is the culprit, the villain, the reason that life is so very difficult right now, right?
But the more we talked, the more furious I got about the differences in our experiences. Seeing COVID from a Mexico view, I began to realize all the ways that I was asked to exist, that I felt like I HAD to exist, that didn’t align with what I need to be free. What I need to be alive.
And suddenly, I realized that my COVID Rage was misplaced. Poor COVID was like my dad who took the brunt of my anger. Anger that wasn’t exactly caused by or meant for him. It was caused by all the things I let slide, all the things I accepted as ok, when they REALLY, REALLY WERE NOT OK.
Mexico is far from perfect, and I don’t want to suggest that COVID’s impacts have not been significant here, or that Mexico is this magic realm where there are no problems. But being here has given me the space to step back and look at the way I’ve been living.
I believe that when we have distance from this moment, we are all going to realize how hurt we’ve been. How much we’ve been holding onto, holding back, swallowing down. How much life we’ve lost. And how angry we are about it.
I’m angry that where I’ve been living, so many violations have been normalized.
I’m angry that other people haven’t been living this way, have been a bit more peaceful, more at ease, when I’ve been wrapped up tight in a lonely and unsustainable protection mode that is just waiting to crack.
In March, just a couple weeks into lockdown, I wrote this post (ah, naïve and innocent March Keitlyn…) where I reflected that:
“Survival is finding the spaces where you still exist, where you can breathe and let down walls for a moment (fight or flight mode: DEACTIVATE) [and] rebelliously carry on. For no other reason than YOU ARE STILL HERE, to create and enjoy these mundane moments of magic.”
But somewhere along the way, I’ve lost that magic.
I’ve grown and changed so very much in this year. I’ve learned to be alone, to find joy in silly things like making pickles. To be resilient, which used to be my favorite word, but now just makes me angry.
I don’t want to HAVE to be resilient. I don’t want to HAVE to be independent. I don’t want to HAVE to carry all this shit. THIS IS NOT OK.
How do I use this anger going forward? We aren’t at the end of the pandemic yet, and even when we are, it was never COVID’s fault to begin with. COVID has made me realize that what I thought was comfort was a body conditioned to overwork and perpetually on the brink of exhaustion. Where I thought I was being heard, I was actually silenced and ignored, gaslighted for dreaming of futures of peace and rest. What I thought was safety and security was actually the bare minimum, so easily taken away.
This post is for you, COVID Rage. Thank you.
I know now that I can’t keep going like this, that my anger is a neon sign pointing to all the things that are not, and have not been, OK. And so, I step back, reassess, and form new strategies for the year ahead. Strategies that take consistent stock of my stores of energy, peace, and joy, and welcome COVID Rage as my guiding light.
[1] Watching college students be asked to avoid socializing was like watching the Stanford Marshmallow Test, a psychological test where young kids are given the choice between eating the tempting marshmallow placed in front of them, or getting two marshmallows if they are able to patiently wait 15 minutes (a seemingly endless amount of time) alone in the room with the tantalizing treat. While googling to find the name of this experiment, I stumbled on The Atlantic’s article about how “patience”, in this case, also ends up falling along race and class lines. It’s easy to be patient when you know you’ll be safe, when your past has proven that you’ll always be safe. Add in insecurity, trauma, and consistent broken promises, and it turns out patience is a whole lot less reliable than just taking what you need when you need it.
[2] 444k in Indiana vs. 269k in Mexico City; 17 million cases in the U.S. vs. 1.27 million cases in Mexico as of December 18th, 2020.
