The Corona Virus is coming to get us. We are holed up, with our toilet paper, ready
to practice social distancing. We are
doing this for the herd. It won’t hurt
us, individually, but collectively it will.
In fact, there is a lot that we do for ourselves that won’t hurt us,
individually, but that seems to have wreaked havoc on the world.
I am, in addition to being a psychoanalyst, a professor at a
mid-sized University in the Midwest. A
little like David Byrne did in the 1980s, I wonder, how did I get here? I am tremendously lucky. I have been gifted with reasonable
intelligence and an environment that has nurtured that.
This wasn’t accidental.
My parents, who are both well-educated, made sure to check out the
school systems when we made a move for my Dad’s corporate job. Education was always highly prized. Other things that were highly prized included
self-reliance – so I was taught never to go into debt except to buy a home. I did accrue modest college debt.
My graduate education was paid for by the State, at a time
when that was being done, and I was able, when I graduated, to choose my next
steps based on what made sense for my career, not based on economic necessity. After post-doc training, we moved to a part
of the country that put us near family and we settled down. I took a job at the University that did not
pay well, but was steady work.
We have done alright.
I now live in a very nice home with a short commute to work. We have cars and have almost completed
putting three kids through college (a huge source of anxiety for me over the
last twenty years – how would we do that?). We have followed a plan – and dealt with
various revisions to that plan. I have
divorced and remarried – there have been bumps along the way, but we have “made
it” largely unscathed – with comfort even, which I have always justified by the
hard work which “earned” it.
This week is spring vacation. It has felt completely compressed. I had a paper due yesterday and I have been
fretting about that for weeks and working on it with more force and energy over
the last few days. Meanwhile, the Covid-19
virus has been bearing down on us.
Wednesday – was that just two days ago? – I was talking with
someone who was debating whether or not to go to Disney World next week. We were bemoaning the fact that there has not
been clearer guidance about what we can and cannot do. This was after the school where I work had
decided that, after Spring break, all classes would be turned into distance
learning classes.
Well, the world has informed us. All theme parks are now closed. The NCAA Basketball tournament, which was to
proceed without fans now won’t proceed at all.
Only the Golfers will, for now, continue – they don’t need fans. They will need camera people, though, and
people crammed into a truck to coordinate the broadcast. What will happen next?
So I have been feeling totally unprepared to teach
remotely. I have never taught an online
course. I think that we will be able to
bring the ship home just fine, but I am a little rattled. I got my paper turned in yesterday, and I
taught a small psychoanalytic institute class this morning remotely rather than in
person. We all got on Zoom and that was
fine. And I got some good news. They are going to extend the break a week so
that we can get our act together. This
is very welcome news.
But I am feeling ill.
Is it Covid-19? I don’t think
so. The symptoms are mostly a burning in
my cheeks. I threw my back out cleaning
up the yard so that some painters can paint our house. But mostly feel like I have no energy – no ability
to get excited about having an extra week to grade the stuff I didn’t get to
this week and learning how to teach remotely.
But this feeling has been building for much longer than the
past week. There is the sense that the
things that I have done “right”, the things that I have done to make the world
a better place for me and my kids, have actually been wreaking havoc with the
planet. Is this virus nature’s way of
telling us something’s wrong (OK, sorry, now I have dipped into my 1960s Spirit
sound track)?
If I let my paranoid thoughts go; if the virus is a call from
nature – an attack on the beast that is destroying this beautiful planet that
has taken billions of years to evolve, then I am part of the problem that needs
to be removed. And, because of my deeply
guilty nature, there is a weird way in which it feels directed at me and me alone. It is all my fault that the environment is a mess.
That last paragraph, by the way, is at least partly a
symptom of social distancing. As we feel
more and more isolated, we begin to feel existentially isolated. One way to compensate for the people hunger
that we begin to feel is to begin to invent people. Even if those people are anthropomorphized
concepts, like nature. It is better to
be connected to someone who wants to kill us than not to be connected at all.
And I have been feeling more and more disconnected. After I stepped down as chair, where I was at
the nexus of much that went on within our department, we remodeled our building
on campus. This meant moving out for the
summer, and I found that working at home, something that I had never done
except in the evening after dinner, was quite pleasant. So now I work there a lot. And I think I am more productive – there simply
aren’t as many interruptions. But I am
more isolated.
Social distancing is the major tool we have right now to buy
the time that we need to construct the medical responses to this new
threat. This is not the apocalypse, but
it is our responding to it. We will
return. There will be a short term hit
to the stock market as people lose incomes and quit shopping and travelling and
only Netflix and Purell will end up profiting in the short run. But in the long run, we will be OK.
Or will we?
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Other COVID related posts:
I: Apocalypse Now my first posting on COVID-19.
II: Midnight in Paris is a jumping off point for more thinking about COVID. (Also in Movies).
III: Hans Selye and the Stress Response Syndrome. COVID becomes more normal... for now.
VI: Get back in that classroom Paranoid ruminations.
VII: Why Shutting Classes Makes Fiscal Sense A weak argument
XIII: Ennui
XIV. Where, Oh Where have my in-person students gone? Split zoom classes in the age of COVID.
XVIII. I miss my mask?
IXX. Bo Burnham's Inside Commentary on the commenter.
XXVIII. How will we move on from our Empire of Pain? (Also in books)
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