I am so fucking angry about this virus right now

The idea that my life might end in the next 2 years because I caught a virulent new virus that killed me is hard to accept, and yet the reality is that I am over 60, 25 lbs. overweight, and have controlled hypertension. I also live with people who make their own way in the world, with different issues, and while we totally agree on all the main safety protocols, being out and about has risks. And, as Dr. Erin Bromage says, the most likely way to get sick is in your own house, from someone who unknowingly brought it home. So much we don’t know.

For the first 60 days of the quarantine, I strove to be compassionate, kind, practice Buddhist non-attachment, and acceptance. I bit my lip with annoying behaviors on Zoom work calls, focused on eating healthy food, and got engaged with my new sourdough starter and the fattening comfort foods I could make. Bread, waffles, pita, flatbread, pancakes, English muffins — treats every other day.

But now, 3 months in, I realize that what I’ve been shoving down with food is that I am fucking angry. Angry and mourning the loss of how I expected things would be, which they will not be back to for a while, if ever again.

Here in California, we’re starting to reopen our cities, but the reality is that the only thing that has greatly changed since COVID-19 started to propagate in our area is that we don’t have an impossible surge, so it is possible to get a bed in the ICU and no hospitals have run out of ventilators yet. We also have testing, kind of, but it feels more like — Not Really,

What this means is that people are going to continue to get sick and die from COVID-19 for at least the next year and that we’re not going to flatten the curve so much as exhaust it.

I worry that I will be one of those people who does everything so carefully right now, and then gets caught in an ugly second wave in the fall or later in the winter.

I worry that I’m not going to be able to get on a plane to travel cross country to see family in New York, or see my frontline worker adult child and feel safe if we hug.

I worry that my life is going to have these constraints that I honestly recognize are so much more privileged than so many other peoples’, and yet this is going to be how it is until I get sick and die.

And then I wonder if I am more afraid than other aging people I know, or if I am just willing to say all this because I am so fucking mad.

Mad at our country, mad at how we came to this, made at the privilege and systemic racism and fatphobia and awful healthcare and lack of a living wage and oppression — so many things — that life with this virus blew a huge hole in, exposing the dirty spots, the rot, and the failure to repair our toxic, throwaway culture.

And yet, in another way, the only response to so much anger is tenderness.

As much as I rage against what is, I also lean into the sweetness so I don’t burn out: my grown son and I texting about the pizza dough we’re making (he’s coaching me), the love of my partner and family here in Oakland, the incredible generosity of neighbors, the old friends where strong ties have resumed, because who knows what the future will bring, the new economic fabric my colleagues and I are knitting together because we’ve learned that the way to get it done is to do for ourselves.

I am so fucking angry, but I am also so fucking humbled, because, goddamnnit — this virus.

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