COVIDrama
By: Chuckles Darkly
Tags: Kindness, Covid Diaries, Stigma, Karen, Isolation

For the next 14 days of my quarantine I am reporting on my COVID-19 experiences. Hoping for drama but most likely it’ll just be a lot of sweating.

There is a stigma attached to COVID-19. I debated on starting this blog for good long 12 minutes because I knew that I was exposing my loved ones to public scrutiny but as it is with having an addiction, keeping things secret doesn’t help anyone. And especially with COVID-19.

I’ve wondered how many people are keeping testing positive a secret for the fear of repercussions, judgement, anonymous condemning emails, rumours being spread, having your life thrown under the microscope. The two questions I’ve been hearing over the past two days have been: Where do you think you got it? How did you get it? People ask because they want to know what NOT to do. They want answers so that they can protect themselves. I’ve asked the same question. I too wanted to know where not to go and what not to do. And, in a way, both of those kinds of questions imply that I must’ve done something irresponsible, that I must’ve gone somewhere where it would be easy to catch the virus and done something to bring it on?

I don’t know what to tell you. I left the house for the first time in months. I had a dental surgery more than a week ago and I felt off afterwards, which is a normal part of recovery. I was given painkillers, I was told to rest, my face swelled, I bought Rubik’s cube to distract myself from the discomfort. I had to cancel teaching that week because it was hard to talk, plus I didn’t want my students to see my balloon face because I am vain and Zoom is forever. Other than that, there have been no outings, I mean, except for the underground rave I attended on Friday with 1,200 Germans. I like techno, what can I say. But in all seriousness, that dental escapade was the only time I can think of and those guys were serious about keeping things masked and disinfected because you know, surgery.

Like every hipster malcontent I receive packages from ordering online. I open them with rubber gloves on, I take out stuff, play with it, read it, wonder why I ordered it in the first place. I don’t know what exposure risk that entails but I hope minimal, same with those online groceries. Samuel, my man at Instacart wore rubber gloves judging by the pictures he kept texting me while holding objects that were to replace things the store didn’t have.

My boyfriend works from home. He doesn’t socialize and he moved in temporarily before the lockdown so he no longer travels between our households. Now we are stuck here together and it’s anything if not romantic. Romantic like you’d have two prisoners thrown into the same cell without possibility of parole. We’d sometimes go for walks in desolated parking lots of the EX or by the lake, often in the evening, and it’d be apocalyptically empty. On seeing other human beings, he’d swiftly cross to the other side; I still had to think about doing that but for him it’s a muscle memory. It’s been like this for quite some time, and now we don’t go out at all as of yesterday, we are confined to 500 sq ft and are this as close to murder suicide as it can get, not sure which one of us will snap first. My kid is at his dad’s and for now I will only get to see him on zoom, I will not get to squeeze those velvety, pink cheeks for a while and I miss that.

I know I don’t need to explain forever how we’re handling this but the reason why I’m writing about this — other than the ones I’ve mentioned previously — is because I want to give an honest report of what it’s like when family, and school and social responsibility are all a part of these permutations. I don’t want to be stigmatized for something that was out of my control. And, paradoxically, COVID-19 is anything but an isolation disease. I think that collectively this disease has made us paranoid, suspicious, alarmed. And frustrated with getting no answers from our government or health officials, so we’re all looking for someone to blame. I too want to lash out. I don’t believe I caught this at my dentist’s but there was a small part of me that wanted to send a Karen of an email to them — instead I just let them know I had COVID-19 and that they should probably look into things.

Around the holidays, a woman in my low-rise building chased after me and my son because we entered the vestibule with our masks off. In retrospect, that was somewhat irresponsible, we just weren’t thinking, we were almost home and as we walked up the stairs started to remove all those winter layers… masks included. The woman ran up the stairs after us and screamed well within the earshot of my 11-year-old, “your mother is a selfish c**t!” That was extreme, but I also thought how the pandemic pushes all of us to the brink of sanity, how paralyzed with fear she must’ve been to lose her shit like that. I was shaken up but part of me understood.

Here’s what I can say: whatever you do or don’t do, you might get it. Whether you take the public transit (but don’t), or an Uber (don’t), or go for walks and don’t jump fast enough before bumping into a lady who suddenly stops to scoop poop, you might get it. Whether you order your groceries online or run to the corner store every hour to get more milk duds, you might get it. Whether you see your long-lost cousin at a big fam reunion, or haven’t left the house since March 2020… you might get it. All we can do, really, is minimize the risk, which means staying inside as much as possible, sticking to your bubble, getting tested when you’ve been exposed or feel off… but above all, trying to be kind to one another since, yes, we are all in this together, very much so and no one is more to blame than anyone else (unless you’re a dumb anti-masker, pizza-gate-believer — in that case, really, fuck off and stay off). Being kind and supportive will ensure that the isolation won’t end up isolating you mentally, which is worst of all, when you are sick.