Day 5: Gravity

Well.

If ever there was a time to write your thoughts down, hey?

The world is on fire—even more on fire than it was before. I'm hiding in my bedroom with coffee and chocolate. People are fighting on Facebook about whether or not Covid-19 is actually a big deal, as though Las Vegas and the Disneys and international travel would shut down for something that wasn't really a big deal (I'm on Team Big Deal and I think we're winning).

Everything has been canceled.

I was scheduled to speak at a conference this weekend and at a publishing symposium in a couple of weeks. I had a birthday party to go to on Friday night and a hair appointment on Friday afternoon. I was going to go to the Naked Bean on Thursday morning and write; I was going to go to Karlie's house this morning and Kiersten's on Friday morning. And so on, and on, and on.

I started writing this blog post on Monday, but I didn't get very far. Things were happening too fast that day to write about them. I wrote, I wonder if they'll close the borders, and two seconds later Justin Trudeau did a press conference asking all the Canadians to come home. I wrote,  I'm pretty sure they're going to close down the schools soon, and two seconds later, Robyn and Kaeli texted to say the schools were closed; surprise! You're a homeschool mom now!

(It has never been my daydream to be a homeschool mom.)

But that's just such a perfect picture of how things have been this week. You know what I'm talking about. Huge things are happening so fast, so quietly. You expect them but they're still, somehow, shocking when they happen. This is closed, that is cancelled, life is different, it's a beautiful day.

My window is open, Scarlett and Sullivan are playing in the backyard. The birds are out there too; everyone in my backyard is completely oblivious to what's going on around the world. That's a little blessing in and of itself: that in a global pandemic, birds and kids sound just like birds and kids always do.

One of Sullivan's kindergarten classmates lives across the street from us. Her mom sent me a few of the pages she'd printed off for her daughter to do on their first day of homeschool, so I printed them off too and gave them to Sully. I took a picture of him doing his work and sent it to his classmate's mom, who did the same for me. I showed Sully the picture of his friend working on the same paper as him and he was so thrilled about it. He noted that she was doing a better job of it than he was, and faster than him, too, and he told me, excitedly, how that is how she always is, how she's always so fast and good, and she never gets in trouble at school, and she wins a lot of the games they play in gym class. He was so proud of her, so happy to see a picture of her, and it made my heart hurt a little, that he's made all these sweet, real friendships at school and it's just done, all of a sudden.

Last week I was stressed out because no one else seemed stressed out. I wanted to go home and lock my family in but everything around here was very "business as usual" so I didn't feel like I could. I was talking a fair bit with a friend who lives in Italy, reading her blog, and it was all very sobering for me. She didn't sugarcoat it, she urged me—urged all of us—to take it seriously. But there was this disconnect: everything here was still so normal. People were still saying things like, "It's just the flu!" and "Do you want to go to that concert on March 30?"

So on the weekend, when things started picking up and people started cancelling events and the government began giving press conference after press conference, I had a day or two of incredible calm. Okay, I thought, we're taking action and everything's going to be okay. My favorite part of all of it was when companies started sending out emails detailing how they were sanitizing their buildings and making their employees wash their hands whenever they handled money. I know (from Twitter) that everyone else was getting sick of those emails but I savored every word. I wanted to print them off and make a literary magazine out of them.

(Hey. If I want to find joy in the sanitization of usually-filthy public spaces and in the moratorium on handshaking, let me have my moment. It was super fleeting anyway; now we're onto heavier things.)

My zen was disrupted by my first post-weekend trip to the grocery store. It was Monday, the day they cancelled school. Everyone was walking around looking stunned and blatantly terrified, people were filling up their carts with beans and Kraft Dinner, there were no eggs, there was no flour, no sugar, no cream, no soap, no toilet paper.

(Can I do a toilet paper rant for a minute? Huge rabbit trail, here. Everyone's been giving the hoarders a really hard time, and I get it, I do. I'm sure there are people who have stocked up on way more TP than they will need in a lifetime without any thought to the people who can't afford to stock up on stuff and I agree that that is selfish. I'm just getting tired of the whole, "Coronavirus doesn't give you the runs; you idiots!" chant I keep hearing everywhere. These people aren't afraid that coronavirus is going to make them need to use the bathroom more; they're stocking up so they won't have to leave the house for a bit, as per the CDC's advice at the very beginning of this whole thing. The ones taking it to an extreme are reacting out of fear, not stupidity—it's a way for people to feel in control of something when they don't feel in control of anything else. And it's happening alongside people with big families buying only a little extra TP, like they've been advised to, and alongside everyone in the whole world going shopping on the same weekend and hearing that the toilet paper is running out. The stores will catch up, everything will be fine, and I feel like it's okay for everyone to stop making toilet paper memes and cut it out with the name calling. This is just my opinion. If you have a different one, you should make a blog and write a post about it; I would love that because I think more people should blog, just in general, and if the toilet paper thing is the catalyst for the blogging comeback then GREAT GREAT GREAT.)

Anyway. Where was I? Oh right, "my zen was disrupted by my first post-weekend trip to the grocery store."

I had seen everyone's pictures of empty shelves, but I hadn't yet seen it in real life, so it really shook me when I finally did, maybe extra because I was in the grocery store just around the corner from my house. There was just this moment of, oh, this is not a movie. This is happening here, in my city, in my neighborhood. 

And then I went home and my whole body hurt, and I realized I was tensing every single muscle I had. And then I accidentally read an article about how long this isolation might need to last in order for it to be effective and I began to worry—I began to freak right out. How could everything change this fast? I thought of friends who wouldn't be able to work, those who own small businesses (my own husband being one), family members and friends who work in hospitals.

It's not like the usual anxieties, where I can remind myself that I'm blowing things out of proportion and just distract myself. But it's also not like the usual anxieties in that I am joined in this one by every single person on the planet (besides the cast of the German Big Brother, who, I believe, don't know about the pandemic yet). There is that. There's the knowledge that Sully's little friend is just across the street doing her worksheets, and that everyone has recently found themselves staring at an empty grocery store shelf feeling at least a little bit afraid that this is going to be a new normal, and that Max from The Arkells is giving free music lessons on Instagram Live because he's stuck at home too. It's easy to suddenly feel like our house is the only house in a big blank world, that we will just be here forever, alone. But we're still surrounded by a bunch of other houses—this is a city, after all—and our city is surrounded by a bunch of other cities and towns—this is a province, after all—and our province is surrounded by other provinces and states—you get it—and how incredible is it that we all know what each other is going through, for once?

People talk about gravity when they talk about heavy stuff; they say that phrase, "the gravity of the situation," and I like that because gravity doesn't crush you, it just keeps you on the ground. It doesn't crush you, it just keeps you from floating off into outer space. It's good.

So that's what I've been trying to do when I feel myself freaking out. I let myself recognize the gravity of the situation. I remember the things that I can do and the things that I shouldn't do. And then I try not to dwell on it, because gravity is doing its thing whether you focus on it or not.