Unlearning Shame During the Pandemic

In the United States, there are far fewer shames as great and powerful as the shame of being unemployed or 'not living up to your potential.' If you're unemployed, you're lazy or immoral tends to be the general notion around the concept. I have encountered this overbearing sensation of shame from the people in my life twice. Once after my first place of work shut down, the owners were tired of keeping it open for very little to no gain. I spent about two months feeling miserable that I was unemployed. From my family to my friends, I thought everyone thought less of me because I wasn't going to a job and contributing to some ethereal ideal of work. Eventually, I found a job at a restaurant where a few of my friends worked. Four years later, I suddenly found myself at the familiar ground of unemployment again, and once again, something out of my control: The Covid-19 Pandemic.

The Novel Coronavirus has uprooted and upended nearly every person's life on this planet in the last fourteen months. This microscopic devil has caused untold destruction to people's lives, various nations' economies, and to our understanding of how a global society functions in times of crisis. I've shared a fair amount of difficulties adjusting to covid-19, but my story, unlike so many thousands of others, doesn't end or even include a startling degree of tragedy. I have probably one of the most unique and hard-to-reconcile outcomes when dealing with covid-19. By and large, I feel my quality of life has primarily improved as an indirect result of what came with covid-19. My start into this frightening, new world is somewhat similar to many others. Still, as we Progress through these many months filled with untold death and destruction where most lives were drought with challenges and suffering, I finally feel like I got to pull mine together because of an indirect gift covid-19 gifted me: time.

Like many other Americans, in January and February of 2020, I didn't think much of covid-19 when I first started hearing about it. I'm young, but I have lived through the emergence of SARS, H1N1, Zika, Ebola, MERS in that relatively short lifespan. In the beginning, it just felt like a repeat of those events cycling through again. Around early March, the reports started to come through: Young people can get just as sick as anyone else, and it was at that point the changes started rolling in one after another. My workplace, a Ruby Tuesday in my small city, told us that the restaurant had to close down for lockdown measures and that they would be scaling back their operations considerably until they could open back up. At this point, I made a solemn vow to myself: I would not let myself or any of my family members get sick with Covid-19. I would do as much as I possibly could to protect them from this microscopic threat. I had plenty of time to devote to this mission now that I was unemployed, if only temporarily.

My life then became a trial of doing anything and everything in my power to try and protect my loved ones. The first month and a half were the hardest. My family was scattered all across the United States. People panic-bought all the usual masks that would typically be available at local stores, leaving me with very few options. For a month, while doing the errands to help keep my family safe, it was a game of luck whether or not I would suck in some lousy air and bring the virus home to my family. I spent many days getting a routine for all of this established because I had my 72-year-old stepfather, 90-year-old grandmother, and an older brother who hates going to hospitals and doctors to keep healthy. I was finally able to secure masks a couple of weeks into quarantine from a friend. Finally, I felt a little safer carrying out my responsibilities; this was also when I started missing seeing my family I don't live with and my friends. But I had to do this. I had to keep everyone safe. It couldn't last that long could it?

April came and went as quite possibly the worst month of my entire life. My mental health was in chaos as I tried to desperately ensure the physical health and well-being of family members who didn't think or feel the same way about what was happening as I did, which led me to feel more isolated than ever. I had constant discomfort in my chest and night sweats for weeks, which often had me thinking I had already gotten it earlier when I had to go maskless earlier on in the pandemic. My old workplace called me to bring me back, but since I didn't want to risk my family, I remained unemployed for the foreseeable future, and if you ask certain people, that is the most immoral thing you can be.

Vaccine news was pouring in from early clinical trials, but at the time, I didn't think those would be out for years, so was it already too late for my family and me? When the job I had before the pandemic hit tried calling me back to work, I had to make the tough decision to quit and make sure I wasn't too public-facing so I could help my family. Shame, fear, and regret all culminated inside of me. I entered my darkest thoughts of this whole pandemic, and probably my entire life, during this time. I broke down crying to my mom as soon as she could escape Washington D.C. and work from home. I honestly didn't think I would live past all of this, let alone make sure I kept my solemn promise to see the rest of my family through it all, whether that was because of covid or other factors.

Following my roughest months of March, April, May, and June, routines started getting solidified. Happy family gatherings that would generally be jam-packed were scaled down or disrupted entirely. Scaled-down, more intimate, unique rituals were held on a semi-regular basis to try and keep everyone's spirits up, and I was finally able to see the light. However, doubt still swirled around as the number of cases and deaths coming in every day. Eventually, a terrible thought came to me that I still work on reconciling to this day. The tragedy that occurred due to Covid-19 has destroyed countless lives, killing thousands of people in the U.S. alone. The pandemic upended so many lives, but I felt content, borderline happy to be alive for the first time in a long time. I was finally able to engage with the time Covid-19 unintentionally plopped in front of all of us and engage with that time in ways I wasn't able to before. I was able to fully engage in my hobbies and interests for hours on end, which I hadn't been able to do since high school or earlier. I established routines for myself and saw myself through the usual barriers of my depression and anxieties. I was able to finally discover what it meant to be M.E. outside of society's standard expectations.

So that's what I did. Coming out of many months of Covid-based anxiety and double-depression, I engaged in the things I love. I was able to write again after so long. I was able to think that there was more to this world than simply: work, pay bills, die. The CARES act met my basic financial needs while I fully engaged with the time in ways I couldn't have dreamed of before when I was working tables at Ruby Tuesday or doing some other job. I started entering literary contests. I finally read a massive novel series my entire family loves and had wanted me to read. I was finally working out regularly, eating healthier, and felt I was growing emotionally capable of maintaining my friendships and other relationships, despite the distance we had to put between ourselves during Covid-19. For the first time in a long time, even before covid-19 times, I finally felt like I was going to be okay. Despite that deep internal satisfaction, I still felt somewhat miserable.

I started asking myself this question in the last quarter of 2020: how do I reconcile feeling substantially better mentally, emotionally, and physically now after all this unnecessary death and destruction? How do I justify telling people that I honestly feel better than I have in years? How do I let people know that being unemployed, especially during covid-19 times, probably saved my life because I could finally understand and find myself outside of a job instead of inside one like so many of us are expected to? These are questions that I don't think I will ever have a fully satisfying answer to because I would never willingly trade hundreds of thousands of lives just for me to feel like my life was worth living. Many people will never get to know this feeling I am feeling right now, and there isn't a time when I don't count my blessings and think about how fortunate I've been through this tragic year and some months. The only lesson I have at the end of the day is that I have to take this unexpected gift that Covid-19 gave me and turn it into something positive for the future, and that's what I plan on doing.

The destruction that Covid-19 has wrought will be around long past the time when the last vaccinations go out, and I am going to help heal those wounds however I can. I want to give people exactly what I got during covid-19. Time. Time away from worrying about if rent is due, if they'll have food, a home, and healthcare, so they too can have hope and obtain the same level of peace and contentment that I was able to dig out of the mounds of terrible and awful covid-19 gave us. My time unemployed taught me to value essential and necessary work and not simply value the concept of work for work's sake. I now view my choice to remain unemployed during the worst parts of the covid-19 pandemic highly because it has given me time to see the whole structure of our lives and realize how flawed and broken it truly is.

I'm going to do the work that matters. I'm going to volunteer. I'm going to help people. I'm going to help fundamentally change society, so no one ever has to wonder where their basic needs are coming from. Covid-19 taught me that everybody, everywhere, deserves so much better. We need to do whatever it takes to help people. I am ready to be that change.