Are you sick of it?



I’m sure many of us are getting weary. News, social media, and places we go to escape like parks and brief forays to grab essential items all remind us that Covid 19 is a part of our life. Signs offering instructions on how to act in a store, how to share a park, masked citizens, cancellations of, well, everything. How we go about our lives has been altered and there is nowhere to “escape” the fact that our lives have changed for the long term. And this begs the question about how I might let this experience change me since so much of what I am doing has changed. 

Recently, I have stumbled across versions of this sentiment on social media: “Covid 19 is part of my world/the way I live now, but it is not my life. I am tired of reading about it.”


I understood, of course. But it did make me think. What is my time on earth about if not to be shaped by the experiences I live? I hope, for myself, I take it on and let it make me grow.


Here’s a story:


My oldest brother Kelley is being challenged by this new Covid 19 life. Without his daily AA meetings time has become hard to manage. The absence of this cornerstone to his day has filtered out to affect every arena of his life. How to manage medication, how to get food, how to stay connected. My mom and dad and my younger brother and his wife spent last weekend trying to sort through his needs and what is available to him. Getting answers is hard now because: Covid 19. People aren’t working the same hours in the same way, Kelley doesn’t know how to operate a computer, let alone own one. He doesn’t even really know how to call a person for help, except for mom. What he could do was choose a random hospital and walk in -- and that is what he did. He took himself to a hospital and said, “I'm gonna hurt someone. I need help.”  


We are lucky he was able to ask for help, and he is lucky to have someone who can help him. Despite the fact that my 75-year-old mother was working at a convenience store 45 minutes in the opposite direction, she took off to check on her son because a mother never stops mothering.


When I hear my mom speak about all of this, a weight settles on my chest, because Kelley’s story is one of millions that will never be told. 


Covid 19 is not my life, but it is shaping my life because it is shaping my brother’s life and it is shaping my mother’s life and it is shaping my family’s life. I don’t see how to separate any of this. 


Privilege is a huge part of being able to let it not define you. Those fortunate enough to stay home in a peaceful environment may get to set their own boundaries and go inward, using newfound time and absence of distractions for self-discovery. They get to choose how their time is spent on this exploration. I know I can easily get sucked into my little safe home in a lovely little river town, while my aging mother drives and works and frets and here I am. 


But too many of us have no choices and those of us who do often forget that. And so what do I do?

To me it’s like a painting and one of the colors is Covid 19. The brush strokes and colors we choose to create this new life will be in this painting whether we want them there or not. Is Covid 19 defining my life? No but yes? I don't know exactly. For sure it is affecting it. 

I think about the world I am creating, painting, if you will. I think about Kelley. His painting is an angry Jackson Pollack, full of randomly tossed colors that make no sense to him. 


I’m watching it all, trying to make space for it, and not let the feeling of rankle rise up or worse, silence me. And here is where I land:  I don’t care if you are sick of Covid 19. Covid 19 is making the world sick and not just with the virus. I get that we all need to take news breaks. I wholeheartedly agree. But if you can tune out Covid’s existence, you are among the most fortunate in the world.


There are a million others who do not have that choice. I agree that it does not have to define you, but then again, why not? Why not let a pandemic shape who you are becoming? Why not let the ugly parts of the world be so impossible to ignore that you are forced to use that Covid 19 color in your painting because you decide you are one of us and you can no longer ignore that.


The truth about me is I will never stop longing for a Kumbaya moment. What has changed is that moment looks different to me now. It used to be about coming together in harmony but that if it is not happening during a pandemic, when will it?  What I do long for is simple recognition. I long for a world where we see each other. I see you, I see your pain, I see your suffering, and I will not ignore it. 


I will use my time and my gifts and my heart to find a way to make your life better. I will do what I can in this moment for someone else. It might be wearing a mask even if I think it’s a load of bunk, it might be donating food to a shelter, it might be hammering out this piece of writing and sharing it for the world so you can understand you are not alone. Or, it might be just listening to some of countless stories being told and letting them settle inside me long enough to know I am no longer the same person. I have changed my way of being because I let myself be changed by you.   



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