Having Covid-19 in 2022
Mar. 21st, 2022 03:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
queenofzanContent note: Suicidal ideation
I’ve been sicker than when I had Covid. I had the actual flu once as a child, which knocked me out for an entire week. Most of my memories of that time are of lying on my grandmother’s couch in front of the tv, bundled up under blankets, sucking down orange juice whenever possible, with one or more doberman pinschers laying on my legs or next to me on the floor, attempting to protect me from my own immune system. Since I was under ten, most of the time when I was sick before that, I was over it in a day or two. That experience was the first time I spent a week or more laid up.
I’ve been sicker than when I had Covid. I had the actual flu once as a child, which knocked me out for an entire week. Most of my memories of that time are of lying on my grandmother’s couch in front of the tv, bundled up under blankets, sucking down orange juice whenever possible, with one or more doberman pinschers laying on my legs or next to me on the floor, attempting to protect me from my own immune system. Since I was under ten, most of the time when I was sick before that, I was over it in a day or two. That experience was the first time I spent a week or more laid up.
Covid took me out for four weeks. And that’s only counting the time between the first positive case in my household (my wife) and when I finally got a negative PCR test. I spent another week dealing with some kind of post-Covid bronchitis that I had to see a doctor about. The only reason I know it wasn’t just the Covid lingering is they gave me a PCR test at the doctor’s office and it came back negative, because it was otherwise indistinguishable from the second half of my Covid experience.
That also doesn’t count the lingering effects people have been calling “long Covid”, although I don’t know if my case is “serious” enough to warrant that label. After all, I’m basically fine! Sure, I’ve spent every single day of the last two weeks experiencing a surge of suicidal ideation and anxiety as strong as when my father died suddenly, but I can breathe! …Unless I have to run for the bus or take the stairs. But I’m not coughing! Unless the downstairs neighbors start smoking, or I walk past someone smoking on the sidewalk. But I’m not feverish! At least I’m not feverish.
I will admit, I have no idea how much of my psychiatric symptoms are actually related to the coronavirus and not the stress of missing five weeks of work and school, including the tech process and production period of my graduate thesis show. But it’s certainly because of Covid. I wouldn’t be experiencing this stress without being sick for five weeks. I wouldn’t be anxious that everyone hates me for making things difficult for them by getting sick if I hadn’t gotten sick. I wouldn’t be taking my anti-anxiety meds at a higher rate than I ever have, in the eleven years I’ve been taking them as-needed, if I wasn’t worried literally sick about my ability to catch up with work.
So on to the actual infection with the novel coronavirus, presumably the “mild” Omicron variant based on timing, although I have no test results to back that up. I was vaccinated and boosted several months ahead of this infection. My first vaccine was the J&J, which isn’t quite as effective as the Pfizer and Moderna versions, but with a Pfizer booster, my immunity should have been on par with anyone else’s. I had no history of respiratory illness, barring obstructive sleep apnea that is really more about my throat closing up when I sleep than lung problems. I did have a history of psychiatric and presumably neurological problems, as well as an eleven year history taking psych meds. Thanks to sanitation and masking, it had been two years since I had so much as a common cold or anything worse than feeling a little cruddy in the back of my throat. I did start having allergy symptoms the spring before, which I never had before, but at 29, it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility for me to develop spring allergies, as my mother and many other members of my family have. I do have high cholestorol that is usually controlled by the exercise and activity of a full-time graduate student lifestyle, taking buses and crossing campuses and working four hours a day in a costume shop. I was lower risk than my wife or my mother, both of whom have underlying conditions and medications that put them in a higher risk category than me. My wife wasn’t even boosted, just vaccinated once with the J&J, due to a debilitating fear of needles that means she has been behind on vaccines since she was a child, because medical professionals simply don’t have the time or energy to try and wrestle a needle into a 7 foot tall woman having a panic attack.
It started out much like any other coronavirus or rhinovirus: I got feverish, I got snotty, and everything felt a little…fuzzy. My wife had been sick for two days by this point, and my mother had an episode the night before, after getting a positive test results, that was at least part panic attack and could have been part medication or part Covid, or some combination of all of the above. I had tested negative with our at-home tests, but since I was stuck at home quarantining due to exposure and our home was not big enough to isolate, I figured it was only a matter of time before I was infected as well. I did hold out a faint hope that I, like my sister, would somehow remain asymptomatic even though the rest of my household was sick. At least then I would feel good enough to continue working on my show and doing schoolwork at a distance.
Unfortunately, my immune system is not my sister’s, and the day after the two other members of my household tested positive, two days after my wife was noticeably symptomatic, I started experiencing those familiar cold symptoms.
At first it wasn’t too bad. I mean, I was miserable, but in much the same way I am always miserable with a cold. My head was too hot, my body was too cold, I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t blow my nose enough to get all the snot out, my throat hurt so much it was difficult to swallow down all the fluids I knew my body needed to keep functioning. The mound of dirty tissues on my wife’s side of the bed expanded to my side of the bed as well. Every time I opened the door to let the dog outside or check the mail, my lungs siezed up and I coughed, irritating my already sore throat. I had maybe three or four hours of lucidity a day, in which I checked my emails and attempted to discharge my responsibilities to the production I was costume designing at a distance. I typically slept, woke up long enough to pee and eat, and by the time I was done eating, I was tired again, and would go back to bed. The second time I woke up, after dinner time and around when I should be getting ready for bed on a normal day, is when I felt most awake and capable of dealing with things.
I generally journal each night, to help myself keep track of time, and as a mindfulness exercise suggested by my therapist. I don’t have records from most of the time I was out with Covid. I was sleeping too irregularly, and not really coherent enough to remember, as well as too tired to do it even when I did remember, exhausted by the idea of attempting another maintenance task when the act of eating was enough to wear me out. I managed about a shower a week, which is what I usually manage, but I do not usually get winded halfway through and have to rest for an hour afterward, as I did while I had Covid. I have only a fuzzy, irregular recollection of what I did during this time. I know for a while, I was drawing and working a little on schoolwork while I was sick, sitting at my desk watching videos, much the way I did when I had free time between classwork before Covid. That trailed off as I often didn’t feel able to sit up or keep my attention on a screen for a while at a time. I spent most of my waking hours still laying in bed the second half of my infection, as my mother and wife recovered and went back to going out to pick up groceries or attending Zoom classes. I reread books I’ve read before, replayed video games I played before. I spent a lot of time laying in bed, very slowly transitioning from one of these tasks to another. I was proud of myself for remembering to put on my CPAP mask for my sleep apnea before falling asleep, even while sick.
The problem was that I kept being sick. I was still only just sick enough to not be able to do things, but not sick enough to not be painfully aware of how much time was passing. Sick enough to not be able to be productive, but not sick enough to not feel guilty about it. Even though I knew the best research we had about long Covid and post-viral syndromes after Covid infection said the absolute best thing for me to do was exactly what I was doing, and rest as much as possible, not push myself to get better, not push myself back to work sooner than I was actually ready to be back, missing the entire tech process of my thesis show was…unpleasant. I was not actively suicidal until I realized that I had misread the performance schedule, and even my family who was no longer sick wasn’t going to be able to see the show, because that night was the final performance, not the penultimate performance, and there wasn’t time for them to get to the theater.
The next week was spring break. It was only somewhat of a relief because, despite the fever going down, I had developed a cough, and that cough lingered. The Monday before spring break, I smelled the downstairs neighbors smoking a cigarette, and had a coughing fit my asthmatic mother characterized as my first asthma attack. I coughed and coughed and coughed until I retched and threw up bile, and then kept coughing with my throat burning. I finally managed to calm the coughing down and drink enough water to soothe my throat, and went to sleep. When I woke up the next morning, I felt as if my lungs and throat were on fire. I’d only ever felt that way after running too hard or too long, but this was how I woke up after hours of sleeping with a humidifier strapped to my face. The Friday before spring break, I went to the doctor, because five days later, I was still unable to take a deep breath without triggering a coughing fit. He prescribed me a steroid and an antibiotic to take, gave me a Covid test, and told me to come back if I wasn’t better in a week. I’d already missed a month of school and work at that point.
I was sick until Thursday or Friday of spring break. I took an at-home Covid test on Saturday, hoping to get my results in time to return to school Monday, or Tuesday at the latest, not realizing the test I took at the doctor’s office was a PCR test, not a rapid test. When those results finally came back inconclusive on Tuesday, I scheduled another test for Wednesday…after class hours and in the middle of what should have been my work day.
I have to note here, that although I was no longer feverish and finally no longer coughing and able to breathe the chill March Minnesota air, I did not feel “good”. I barely felt “better”. The last two weeks of my infection I hadn’t felt that sort of feverish fuzziness so much as a grittiness, like staying up too long on too little sleep. I was extremely foggy. My ADHD meds almost seemed like they weren’t working, except if I forgot a dose, it was noticeably worse, so clearly my functioning was just even slower and more confused than usual. My mom and wife experienced the same thing. We had — and are still having — so many miscommunications, from one of us forgetting a word, or using the wrong word without noticing, or hearing the wrong word, or misinterpreting what someone else said, or a combination of all the above. Even coordinating dinner has become a comedy of errors. All our tempers are short as well, because it is frustrating to be sick and have trouble communicating, even when you know everyone around you is going through the same thing
While writing this account, I’ve had to stop and double check my dates and timelines and social media postings, to try and keep things straight. I skipped a week at one point, and had to go back and figure out what the hell happened in that week.
I finally received test results that I knew to be PCR results that said I was negative for Covid at 3 am on Thursday morning. After missing more than a month of school, I was eager enough to get out of the house that I woke up five hours later to get on the bus to class, only to discover that class was canceled. My teacher, despite the multiple emails I had sent her that week expressing my belief I’d be able to come back any day now, I was just waiting on negative results to confirm I was safe to be around, did not bother to tell me class was canceled in favor of working on the next show. I had been out so long on sick leave that I needed a doctor’s note filed with the department administrator to be allowed to work again, so I was at school for the first time in over a month with nothing to do, despite the responsibilities and assignments that had piled up since I first went into isolation.
I made a start on some of the assignments that were now a month overdue. I messaged my doctor to get a note. I let all my teachers know I was officially negative, and would be back in class for the next class period. I was already worried I would need to take Incompletes or somehow get extensions to finish these courses, but I didn’t include that in the first good news email I’d had in five weeks. And I did manage to attend my first class in nearly six weeks on Friday.
I still feel like I’m losing entire hours to how slowly I’m moving. I’m still making more mistakes writing and speaking than I’m used to. As I said, I’m still experiencing elevated levels of anxiety. I’ve been struggling multiple times a day with suicidal ideation and violent intrusive thoughts of harming myself, every day, for two weeks. I get tired and winded and mentally exhausted so easily. I’m at maybe 25% of what I consider my ability to function, which is already only about 75% or 80% of what my colleagues and supervisors seem to expect me to have, due to my various mental health issues. I’ve gotten several paperwork assignments done, as well as personal legal papers, and personal house-hunting papers, and started this morning feeling quite proud of how much I’ve gotten done since Friday. My instructor didn’t seem nearly as impressed as I was.
I don’t know how much my account can do, when there are already hundreds of personal accounts of Covid and its lasting effects. People already don’t want to acknowledge how long healing takes. Covid taking even longer is apparently unbearable.
I just wish I could make the people around me understand that, however unbearable they find my reduced functioning, I find it worse. I’m the one who was bedbound for a month. I’m the one who can’t concentrate on watching a movie with my family. I’m the one who can feel myself slipping further and further behind, with no means of catching up, because I can’t even try to push myself dangerously these days. I shut down so much sooner than I did before. I had to struggle last night to get an assignment done before passing out, with another I had planned to work on still undone, because the first one took more than twice as long as I expected it to. I’m the one struggling to eat, and taking benzodiazepenes more frequently than I’m comfortable with, and reminding myself every three hours that killing myself would not actually solve any of my problems, it would only push them onto my family.
Covid hit the USA in my second semester of graduate school, two weeks after the first show I had costume designed in six years closed. I spent the next two years struggling to cope with changed circumstances I was unprepared for, because I had spent the five years between undergrad and grad school building up strategies and methods to cope with a pre-Covid world. The ADHD that I had learned to manage in undergrad and while freelancing completely tanked my grades in a distance-learning paradigm. The travel funding for research that I was so excited to be awarded was quietly redirected, because the event I planned on attending was canceled. I was told I’d have increased priority for funding the following year, but in Fall 2020, when the deadlines for funding applications were due, nowhere was confident they’d be open in summer 2021. And to be fair, the event I planned to attend in 2020 was canceled again in 2021. The show I was to design my second year of graduate school was a slog from the start, because my depression and anxiety about the state of the world made it difficult to care about anything, and we slowly realized we weren’t going to be able to put on a traditionally staged show, and had to push back our performances, dragging the process out and into one I was not familiar with or prepared for. My grandmother died that Christmas, not of Covid, but almost certainly because Covid protocols meant we couldn’t visit her, and she was an old woman in pain and alone, when she’d thrived all her life on attention.
It feels sometimes as if Covid has taken everything from me. I waited five years to get into this graduate program, which due to Covid, has not been at all what I expected or needed. But what else was I going to do? I’m a theatre artist. All the theaters were shut down anyway. At least in school, I had something to occupy my time. At least I was working toward a thesis, that I was promised I would be allowed to come back and design if we had to cancel another season of in-person shows. But in the end, Covid took that from me, too. The show went up, but I didn’t see it. I wasn’t even there for the last week of its rehearsal process. I had to trust that the costume shop and the actors and the rest of the production team had seen enough of my designs and had enough of the materials they needed to finish mounting a show without me. I haven’t even seen photos of my costumes onstage. I’m going to have to include a section about Covid in my written thesis, to explain the way I dropped out of the production at a critical time. Hopefully I can crib some of that from this essay, because it is very painful to think about, let alone write about.
I know it could be worse. No members of my family were hospitalized from our Covid infections. My high risk family recovered relatively quickly. We’re alive, we made it through, we still have each other. But it feels a little like no one else understands or cares how difficult this was and remains for us. It’s like they think it was just a cold, and we’re taking it too seriously. I got off light, with a mild case that only lasted four weeks and didn’t require hospitalization. That’s light. That’s mild. That’s lucky.
I’ve thought about killing myself every day for the last two weeks.
How fortunate I was, to get off so lightly.
That also doesn’t count the lingering effects people have been calling “long Covid”, although I don’t know if my case is “serious” enough to warrant that label. After all, I’m basically fine! Sure, I’ve spent every single day of the last two weeks experiencing a surge of suicidal ideation and anxiety as strong as when my father died suddenly, but I can breathe! …Unless I have to run for the bus or take the stairs. But I’m not coughing! Unless the downstairs neighbors start smoking, or I walk past someone smoking on the sidewalk. But I’m not feverish! At least I’m not feverish.
I will admit, I have no idea how much of my psychiatric symptoms are actually related to the coronavirus and not the stress of missing five weeks of work and school, including the tech process and production period of my graduate thesis show. But it’s certainly because of Covid. I wouldn’t be experiencing this stress without being sick for five weeks. I wouldn’t be anxious that everyone hates me for making things difficult for them by getting sick if I hadn’t gotten sick. I wouldn’t be taking my anti-anxiety meds at a higher rate than I ever have, in the eleven years I’ve been taking them as-needed, if I wasn’t worried literally sick about my ability to catch up with work.
So on to the actual infection with the novel coronavirus, presumably the “mild” Omicron variant based on timing, although I have no test results to back that up. I was vaccinated and boosted several months ahead of this infection. My first vaccine was the J&J, which isn’t quite as effective as the Pfizer and Moderna versions, but with a Pfizer booster, my immunity should have been on par with anyone else’s. I had no history of respiratory illness, barring obstructive sleep apnea that is really more about my throat closing up when I sleep than lung problems. I did have a history of psychiatric and presumably neurological problems, as well as an eleven year history taking psych meds. Thanks to sanitation and masking, it had been two years since I had so much as a common cold or anything worse than feeling a little cruddy in the back of my throat. I did start having allergy symptoms the spring before, which I never had before, but at 29, it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility for me to develop spring allergies, as my mother and many other members of my family have. I do have high cholestorol that is usually controlled by the exercise and activity of a full-time graduate student lifestyle, taking buses and crossing campuses and working four hours a day in a costume shop. I was lower risk than my wife or my mother, both of whom have underlying conditions and medications that put them in a higher risk category than me. My wife wasn’t even boosted, just vaccinated once with the J&J, due to a debilitating fear of needles that means she has been behind on vaccines since she was a child, because medical professionals simply don’t have the time or energy to try and wrestle a needle into a 7 foot tall woman having a panic attack.
It started out much like any other coronavirus or rhinovirus: I got feverish, I got snotty, and everything felt a little…fuzzy. My wife had been sick for two days by this point, and my mother had an episode the night before, after getting a positive test results, that was at least part panic attack and could have been part medication or part Covid, or some combination of all of the above. I had tested negative with our at-home tests, but since I was stuck at home quarantining due to exposure and our home was not big enough to isolate, I figured it was only a matter of time before I was infected as well. I did hold out a faint hope that I, like my sister, would somehow remain asymptomatic even though the rest of my household was sick. At least then I would feel good enough to continue working on my show and doing schoolwork at a distance.
Unfortunately, my immune system is not my sister’s, and the day after the two other members of my household tested positive, two days after my wife was noticeably symptomatic, I started experiencing those familiar cold symptoms.
At first it wasn’t too bad. I mean, I was miserable, but in much the same way I am always miserable with a cold. My head was too hot, my body was too cold, I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t blow my nose enough to get all the snot out, my throat hurt so much it was difficult to swallow down all the fluids I knew my body needed to keep functioning. The mound of dirty tissues on my wife’s side of the bed expanded to my side of the bed as well. Every time I opened the door to let the dog outside or check the mail, my lungs siezed up and I coughed, irritating my already sore throat. I had maybe three or four hours of lucidity a day, in which I checked my emails and attempted to discharge my responsibilities to the production I was costume designing at a distance. I typically slept, woke up long enough to pee and eat, and by the time I was done eating, I was tired again, and would go back to bed. The second time I woke up, after dinner time and around when I should be getting ready for bed on a normal day, is when I felt most awake and capable of dealing with things.
I generally journal each night, to help myself keep track of time, and as a mindfulness exercise suggested by my therapist. I don’t have records from most of the time I was out with Covid. I was sleeping too irregularly, and not really coherent enough to remember, as well as too tired to do it even when I did remember, exhausted by the idea of attempting another maintenance task when the act of eating was enough to wear me out. I managed about a shower a week, which is what I usually manage, but I do not usually get winded halfway through and have to rest for an hour afterward, as I did while I had Covid. I have only a fuzzy, irregular recollection of what I did during this time. I know for a while, I was drawing and working a little on schoolwork while I was sick, sitting at my desk watching videos, much the way I did when I had free time between classwork before Covid. That trailed off as I often didn’t feel able to sit up or keep my attention on a screen for a while at a time. I spent most of my waking hours still laying in bed the second half of my infection, as my mother and wife recovered and went back to going out to pick up groceries or attending Zoom classes. I reread books I’ve read before, replayed video games I played before. I spent a lot of time laying in bed, very slowly transitioning from one of these tasks to another. I was proud of myself for remembering to put on my CPAP mask for my sleep apnea before falling asleep, even while sick.
The problem was that I kept being sick. I was still only just sick enough to not be able to do things, but not sick enough to not be painfully aware of how much time was passing. Sick enough to not be able to be productive, but not sick enough to not feel guilty about it. Even though I knew the best research we had about long Covid and post-viral syndromes after Covid infection said the absolute best thing for me to do was exactly what I was doing, and rest as much as possible, not push myself to get better, not push myself back to work sooner than I was actually ready to be back, missing the entire tech process of my thesis show was…unpleasant. I was not actively suicidal until I realized that I had misread the performance schedule, and even my family who was no longer sick wasn’t going to be able to see the show, because that night was the final performance, not the penultimate performance, and there wasn’t time for them to get to the theater.
The next week was spring break. It was only somewhat of a relief because, despite the fever going down, I had developed a cough, and that cough lingered. The Monday before spring break, I smelled the downstairs neighbors smoking a cigarette, and had a coughing fit my asthmatic mother characterized as my first asthma attack. I coughed and coughed and coughed until I retched and threw up bile, and then kept coughing with my throat burning. I finally managed to calm the coughing down and drink enough water to soothe my throat, and went to sleep. When I woke up the next morning, I felt as if my lungs and throat were on fire. I’d only ever felt that way after running too hard or too long, but this was how I woke up after hours of sleeping with a humidifier strapped to my face. The Friday before spring break, I went to the doctor, because five days later, I was still unable to take a deep breath without triggering a coughing fit. He prescribed me a steroid and an antibiotic to take, gave me a Covid test, and told me to come back if I wasn’t better in a week. I’d already missed a month of school and work at that point.
I was sick until Thursday or Friday of spring break. I took an at-home Covid test on Saturday, hoping to get my results in time to return to school Monday, or Tuesday at the latest, not realizing the test I took at the doctor’s office was a PCR test, not a rapid test. When those results finally came back inconclusive on Tuesday, I scheduled another test for Wednesday…after class hours and in the middle of what should have been my work day.
I have to note here, that although I was no longer feverish and finally no longer coughing and able to breathe the chill March Minnesota air, I did not feel “good”. I barely felt “better”. The last two weeks of my infection I hadn’t felt that sort of feverish fuzziness so much as a grittiness, like staying up too long on too little sleep. I was extremely foggy. My ADHD meds almost seemed like they weren’t working, except if I forgot a dose, it was noticeably worse, so clearly my functioning was just even slower and more confused than usual. My mom and wife experienced the same thing. We had — and are still having — so many miscommunications, from one of us forgetting a word, or using the wrong word without noticing, or hearing the wrong word, or misinterpreting what someone else said, or a combination of all the above. Even coordinating dinner has become a comedy of errors. All our tempers are short as well, because it is frustrating to be sick and have trouble communicating, even when you know everyone around you is going through the same thing
While writing this account, I’ve had to stop and double check my dates and timelines and social media postings, to try and keep things straight. I skipped a week at one point, and had to go back and figure out what the hell happened in that week.
I finally received test results that I knew to be PCR results that said I was negative for Covid at 3 am on Thursday morning. After missing more than a month of school, I was eager enough to get out of the house that I woke up five hours later to get on the bus to class, only to discover that class was canceled. My teacher, despite the multiple emails I had sent her that week expressing my belief I’d be able to come back any day now, I was just waiting on negative results to confirm I was safe to be around, did not bother to tell me class was canceled in favor of working on the next show. I had been out so long on sick leave that I needed a doctor’s note filed with the department administrator to be allowed to work again, so I was at school for the first time in over a month with nothing to do, despite the responsibilities and assignments that had piled up since I first went into isolation.
I made a start on some of the assignments that were now a month overdue. I messaged my doctor to get a note. I let all my teachers know I was officially negative, and would be back in class for the next class period. I was already worried I would need to take Incompletes or somehow get extensions to finish these courses, but I didn’t include that in the first good news email I’d had in five weeks. And I did manage to attend my first class in nearly six weeks on Friday.
I still feel like I’m losing entire hours to how slowly I’m moving. I’m still making more mistakes writing and speaking than I’m used to. As I said, I’m still experiencing elevated levels of anxiety. I’ve been struggling multiple times a day with suicidal ideation and violent intrusive thoughts of harming myself, every day, for two weeks. I get tired and winded and mentally exhausted so easily. I’m at maybe 25% of what I consider my ability to function, which is already only about 75% or 80% of what my colleagues and supervisors seem to expect me to have, due to my various mental health issues. I’ve gotten several paperwork assignments done, as well as personal legal papers, and personal house-hunting papers, and started this morning feeling quite proud of how much I’ve gotten done since Friday. My instructor didn’t seem nearly as impressed as I was.
I don’t know how much my account can do, when there are already hundreds of personal accounts of Covid and its lasting effects. People already don’t want to acknowledge how long healing takes. Covid taking even longer is apparently unbearable.
I just wish I could make the people around me understand that, however unbearable they find my reduced functioning, I find it worse. I’m the one who was bedbound for a month. I’m the one who can’t concentrate on watching a movie with my family. I’m the one who can feel myself slipping further and further behind, with no means of catching up, because I can’t even try to push myself dangerously these days. I shut down so much sooner than I did before. I had to struggle last night to get an assignment done before passing out, with another I had planned to work on still undone, because the first one took more than twice as long as I expected it to. I’m the one struggling to eat, and taking benzodiazepenes more frequently than I’m comfortable with, and reminding myself every three hours that killing myself would not actually solve any of my problems, it would only push them onto my family.
Covid hit the USA in my second semester of graduate school, two weeks after the first show I had costume designed in six years closed. I spent the next two years struggling to cope with changed circumstances I was unprepared for, because I had spent the five years between undergrad and grad school building up strategies and methods to cope with a pre-Covid world. The ADHD that I had learned to manage in undergrad and while freelancing completely tanked my grades in a distance-learning paradigm. The travel funding for research that I was so excited to be awarded was quietly redirected, because the event I planned on attending was canceled. I was told I’d have increased priority for funding the following year, but in Fall 2020, when the deadlines for funding applications were due, nowhere was confident they’d be open in summer 2021. And to be fair, the event I planned to attend in 2020 was canceled again in 2021. The show I was to design my second year of graduate school was a slog from the start, because my depression and anxiety about the state of the world made it difficult to care about anything, and we slowly realized we weren’t going to be able to put on a traditionally staged show, and had to push back our performances, dragging the process out and into one I was not familiar with or prepared for. My grandmother died that Christmas, not of Covid, but almost certainly because Covid protocols meant we couldn’t visit her, and she was an old woman in pain and alone, when she’d thrived all her life on attention.
It feels sometimes as if Covid has taken everything from me. I waited five years to get into this graduate program, which due to Covid, has not been at all what I expected or needed. But what else was I going to do? I’m a theatre artist. All the theaters were shut down anyway. At least in school, I had something to occupy my time. At least I was working toward a thesis, that I was promised I would be allowed to come back and design if we had to cancel another season of in-person shows. But in the end, Covid took that from me, too. The show went up, but I didn’t see it. I wasn’t even there for the last week of its rehearsal process. I had to trust that the costume shop and the actors and the rest of the production team had seen enough of my designs and had enough of the materials they needed to finish mounting a show without me. I haven’t even seen photos of my costumes onstage. I’m going to have to include a section about Covid in my written thesis, to explain the way I dropped out of the production at a critical time. Hopefully I can crib some of that from this essay, because it is very painful to think about, let alone write about.
I know it could be worse. No members of my family were hospitalized from our Covid infections. My high risk family recovered relatively quickly. We’re alive, we made it through, we still have each other. But it feels a little like no one else understands or cares how difficult this was and remains for us. It’s like they think it was just a cold, and we’re taking it too seriously. I got off light, with a mild case that only lasted four weeks and didn’t require hospitalization. That’s light. That’s mild. That’s lucky.
I’ve thought about killing myself every day for the last two weeks.
How fortunate I was, to get off so lightly.
