Shelter in Place

This is what Ruby will look like, awaiting my return.

Shelter in place is what they tell you when there is an active shooter on your campus or neighborhood. Or what they tell you when the hurricane is coming and you haven't skipped town already. This feels different. It feels like it might last forever. 

Let me just admit right now that I might be losing it a little. I'm an anxious person, clinically-speaking. I also happen to be a medically vulnerable person with severe asthma and 10 weeks out from a surgery that has weakened my body and suppressed my immune function.  I'm basically a frail old lady in the body of a what appears to be a healthy, somewhat overfed woman in her mid-thirties. If COVID19 comes for a young person, it could definitely be a person like me. 

In good moments I'm optimistic about my survival chances, and am more worried about my 64-year old mother, whose lungs are so bad that any little cold makes her sound like she's at death's door, and who lives (sorry Mama) in an isolated Trump-loving swamp-town roughly 2600 miles away where she and my father are under the care of a local physician they matter-of-factly call "Dr. Botox."  In bad moments, I'm imagining a scene where I am left to slowly suffocate alone in the hallway of the UC Davis Medical Center's ER, while my puppy, Ruby, starves to death while looking out the window, waiting for my return. (I don't do anxiety in half-measures--I go all the way)

I'm so lucky, really. I'm almost ashamed to count my blessings. 

Home, sweet home!

1) I have a cushy, salaried white-collar job at an extremely progressive, equity-centered organization who sent out a directive a week ago that all employees should move to virtual work and who threw in an extra 30 days of emergency leave so that, should we get sick or need to care for a sick person, we wouldn't have to use up any of our sick or FMLA leave. I've been considering leaving this organization of late to pursue other career opportunities, but their response to this crisis has been so wonderful that I'm mostly thinking I'll "shelter in place" here for another year or so. 

2) I am a new home owner and have spent the last 6-7 months slowing turning this house into MY home. I basically spent every penny I had on buying and fixing it up (and many pennies I didn't have), but the result is, I have refuge from a chaotic world that is entirely of my making. I have a giant yard where I can get fresh air and play with Ruby without exposing myself to others. I have appliances that are currently working, a new sewer line, and a new washer and dryer. 

Doomsday prep or regular Costco run?

3) I make enough money and have enough access to credit, that it has not been a major hardship to buy several weeks (even months) of groceries and supplies ahead of time. I have a fridge full of eggs and meat and UHT milk and pre-cooked bacon and Duke's mayonnaise, a freezer full of meatballs, chicken breast, and cauliflower-crust pizza, and a pantry full of beans, rice, peanut butter, and protein shakes/bars/powders. I have enough dog food to last several months. I have a giant pack of Costco toilet paper that I can share with others if needed, and if we run out, y'all, I have a gross plan.  

4) I have a responsive primary care giver and access to tele-medicine through work.  I have inhalers, a nebulizer, Prednisone, and Epi-Pens easily accessible. 

5) I have a sister and brother-in-law and the most adorable twin niece and nephew in the entire world, who live 10 minutes away. We are staying away from each other for the moment (since I have recently been in schools), but they could, under duress, take care of my puppy if I had to be hospitalized. 

The cutest babies in the world (take my word for it)

6) I am a highly-educated white person in America. I know how to advocate for myself and others, and when I talk, I am rarely dismissed, blamed, shamed, or vilified as many people of color are, particularly in political and health spheres. 

But I'm also alone. I live alone. I rely mostly on myself. I have a small circle of acquaintances in this new place, and an even smaller circle of friends. When I "shelter in place," I am sheltering without the comfort of loved ones around me. If I get sick, there is no one to take care of me who can risk exposure. I feel some shame around this fact. A lot of shame actually. At my age, my inner critic whispers, I "should" have a spouse. I "should" have children. I "shouldn't" love and rely on my dog as much as I do. It is in times like these that I not only feel my aloneness, but feel lonely (there is a small, but important difference). 

I'm also in a season of profound changes: changes in my body and health, changes in my career, changes in my family, and changes in other parts of my identity. I started this year with such a sense of possibility, where rebuilding felt exhilarating instead of terrifying. But now, faced with weeks of isolation, fear, and lack of normalcy, that sense of possibility feels more like vulnerability. Things that seemed manageable before (my recovery from surgery, my parents returning to Florida after a long stay out here, my financial debts, my overextension on a mortgage, my potential career shifts) all seem like liabilities in this time of uncertainty.

I also have this intense desire to serve my community during this time. I want to volunteer to hand out lunches to kids in the community. I want to do grocery runs for old people and immuno-compromised people. Until I remember that I am one of them. I'm not sure what to do with all this extra time that contributes something. I fear inertia and depression, both things to which I am prone.   

So, for a start, I am going to try to write about this enforced aloneness, rather than wallow in loneliness or anxiety. I'm going to try to find moments of levity, grace, and love in the midst of the mess. And, to be honest, I'm probably going to rant a lot about how my country is trash, and how this crisis is revealing everything that is horrifying about the morally-bankrupt socio-political fabric of our nation. 

So while I'm stuck in the tower, damsel in emotional distress, I'm going to try to find/make some magic. 

"Such a captive maiden, having plenty of time to think, soon realizes that her tower, its height and architecture, are like her ego only incidental: that what really keeps her where she is is magic, anonymous and malignant, visited on her from outside and for no reason at all. Having no apparatus except gut fear and female cunning to examine this formless magic, to understand how it works, how to measure its field strength, count its lines of force, she may fall back on superstition, or take up a useful hobby like embroidery, or go mad, or marry a disk jockey. If the tower is everywhere and the knight of deliverance no proof against its magic, what else?" ~Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49