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I’m used to being scared. I’ve had panic attacks and anxiety my whole life. I have muscles that haven’t relaxed since the nineties. I’ve learned to live with that kind of fear, because I know it’s not real. I know my automatic responses to the world are broken, relative to the expected cultural median. I trained myself to ignore them when I can, and that means when fear is appropriate, I often manage better than people who have not had this training.
This is different. This is real. I may die. Soon. I probably won’t. I turned forty last month, and, to my surprise, my knees didn’t hurt any worse than usual. But I’m also a male smoker, so if I become symptomatic, my odds drop precipitously, even if I quit today, or last year. The medical community has a justified lack of patience with my kind, and the respirator will go to the fifty-year-old jogger in the next room.
This isn’t what scares me. The number of emotional safety mechanisms I have in place to deny the inevitability of personal annihilation is scarier than the actual concept at this point.
Yet all these mental gymnastics are designed to keep me engaged with a world I can no longer engage with. I’m not good at not doing anything. The introverts and the anxious are not okay right now: we use our alone time to do the things we need to do to go back out and be with people. When people are weeks or months away, what’s the point?
The habits I’ve resisted for years have gone nuclear. I refresh Twitter and Facebook and news and virus statistics pages like they’re Pez dispensers full of cocaine. I’ve discovered that my odd physical reactions to being at a bar have nothing to do with my posture or my workday: they were social anxiety, and they’re not limited to socializing. I am fortunate to not have to risk my health by going outside, but since my work depends on restaurants being open, I’m working weekends as my company changes its business model overnight. I don’t even bother trying to remember what day it is; I’m on wibbley-wobbley time. I don’t know if I’ll have a job in a month.
These are not the things that scare me; these are the things that break down my ability to not be scared. And I am very scared.
I’m scared for my friends who work in healthcare. I’m scared for the friends who have lost their jobs. I know people right now who will be dead before this over, and wonder who they are. I’m scared of the credulous looking for conspiracies and miracles, and the cynical who will exploit them. I’m scared of the powerful who conflate vulnerability with expendability. I’m scared of people who think going out is brave and noble, and this is the time to make their stand. I’ve always been scared of people who think their actions are brave and noble. They tend to get other people killed.
I’m scared of when people get hungry. Civilization is well-distributed food. The grocers have to go to work, and they’re at the very end of a chain of warehouses, technicians, distribution centers, truckers, maintenance workers, and farmers. We’ve spent decades pushing every one of these people into desperation, and now, each of them a season or a paycheck away from ruin, if they fail us, we crumble.
I’m scared for the abused and neglected who are now trapped. Many of them will die. Others will commit suicide. Right now people are ignoring aches and pains to relieve hospitals who won’t be able to see them anyway. Some of those aches and pains are cancers that might have been caught, infections in need of antibiotics, diseases that need to be treated now before they become death sentences in a month. People who don’t have to die will be dying for years because of what’s happening today. Because of what didn’t happen a month ago.
I’m scared of fear. Fear is actually quite scary. My fear turns to rage, which turns to sadness. Some people skip the last step. Sometimes I skip it.
I’m scared of where we will be when it’s over. Maybe we’ll fix the systemic rot that got us here. Maybe we’ll have a fascist theocracy that, well, feeds its people. Some fears of socialism are quite valid: a government that provides for its people has a lot of sway with them, regardless of its values. I look at an existing political system that’s currently pondering how many millions of civilians are acceptable losses, and I’m not sure which is worse. For me, that is. If you’re an immigrant, a minority, or a woman, I’ll lend you a magazine when nobody’s looking.
If I live, I will remember this fear. I will remember what happened when I was afraid of real things, and the actions of real people. I will know the character of my neighbors, my city, my country, my world. I will be angry. I will be sad. I will hope that I can still hope.
The fear will wear me down, and I will struggle to prevent it from destroying me, but I will not deny it. I will bring it into myself, and I will not forget this new part of me. I will do the small things I can do to stop the future from knowing it. That which hurt me in my life taught me to shelter whom I could from pain that does not fade. When this knife has finished its cut through our species, and the wound no longer festers, I hope we all learn the same lesson.
