Quarantine for Life
By: Jeremy Butman
Tags: Socialism, America, Covid, Quarantine, Isolation

Quarantine has been especially transformative for me because at the very beginning of it, my father died. The causes were unrelated, basically, to Covid, though who knows how he and my mother would have acted if not for quarantine and anxiety about hospitals. He’d had chest pain for a few days, but was feeling better the day of his heart attack. Perhaps they would have gone to a hospital — but he’d had every heart exam there is and they’d all been fine, so likely they would have just sent him home.

In any case, since my father died in the third week of quarantine, I have radically altered my schedule. I used to go to bed at 3am and wake up at 10. Now I am in bed by 10:30 and up at 6:30. I study a little ancient Greek, a little German, keep two journals, and read every morning. I have locked myself into a stabilizing schedule, one that is largely encouraged by quarantine: no friends are trying to keep me out late at night; I have no commute to tangle with.

I have anxiety about leaving quarantine. Will my schedule return to what it used to be? Will I lose this new focus and organization?

Something else has happened in quarantine. I have had a long period to evaluate friendships and relationships, and what is really meaningful. I have felt that some of my friendship are very meaningful, others, maybe I don’t really need to spend the same amount of energy on when quarantine is over. But, the anxiety is: when it does end, will there be pressure, expectation to return to our social lives exactly as they were before we went in?

I suppose what I’m wondering about is roughly this. We’ve been thinking about quarantine as a ‘pause’ but, in reality, so much has happened — a whole year of our lives. It is going to be very disorienting to return to life, a year more mature, having grappled with all we’ve grappled with, and expect things to fall back into place. We are going to have to reintroduce ourselves and figure out how these new quarantined versions of ourselves are able and willing to return to the world.

I think there will be a strong temptation — not to mention pressure from corporate and political forces — to return to our lives as though nothing has happened. It’s over! Back to normal! And we will want, in some ways, for that to be true. But I think for myriad reasons, it will be more productive if, instead of pretending this was a pause, we think of this as a life-changing event and actually put the energy into thinking about what has changed and what we want to be different when we emerge.

I know this is boilerplate — this is what everyone was saying month one of quarantine. Now, I hear less of that. People don’t say we need to use this as an opportunity to transform, we only hear that we will be back to normal on xyz date. Maybe that’s because since those first months, we have actually already transformed, and we don’t know what to make of our new selves. The transformation wasn’t in the healthcare system, or tax system, or anything structural, alas, it was internal, social, and personal. We didn’t get anything out of the ghouls who run things, we were forced to watch ourselves turn into shriveling, maniacal shut-ins, to see what our souls do when the outside world is an unwatchable miasma of idiocy, not to mention physically inhospitable. In addition to doing all that good stuff, I also smoke a lot more weed, watch a lot more porn, and sleep a lot more. I am waiting to desiccate and blow away. This is part of the experience, too, the trauma and shell-shock that we will have to work through.

We’ve largely been left to figure all this out on our own, and I suspect when we reemerge, we will be different people, people who likely, hopefully, are more in touch with themselves, and more aware of what the world is. Rather than waiting for quarantine to end, we should be thinking about how to hold onto this new contact we have with ourselves, this new appreciation we have for each other. And, for that matter, the memory of how empty, craven and destroyed this country really is.