COVID Doldrums, or How I Learned to Be Happy and Sad at the Same Time

By Anonymous, somewhere in the U.S. …

Very early on during the pandemic, I was laid off from my job. One Monday morning, I woke to my phone buzzing with an email from some regional manager that I'd never met. He wanted to express his regret that the company would be losing such valuable worker, but that these times would be hard, and I could reapply for my old job once things had “calmed down.” I worked in food service, so I had seen the writing on the wall. The only feeling I could muster at that point was apathy. I deleted the email and took a nap.

I moved to working on my personal projects while the government floundered about what to do about the virus. Making art while the world was exploding seemed like poetic justice to me, somehow. At first, I felt guilty for enjoying the experience, but that pleasant feeling was short-lived. Every bit of news we got brought me lower and lower. How deadly COVID-19 proved to be. How little people seemed to care. Trump being Trump. I was smoking weed every day, just to not feel awful. My days all started to blur together into a routine of waking up, eating, working for five or six hours, and then smoking myself into a numb stupor and vegetating to trash TV.

It seemed like every good thing died in the face of the bad, and there was no one to help, because we were all feeling it. I still feel fortunate to have very meager expenses and to have received a good amount of the federal aid before it dried up. Maybe I should have been content, but I wasn't. I'm still not.