I feel static in my bones when I touch door handles but now I wonder if everyone else does too. Do you all now feel a tightness in your chest, feel the cartilage connecting your sternum to your ribs evapourating when you hear a wheeze or cough or sneeze? Inadvertently tasting hand sanitizer because I put it on too soon before eating is less unpleasant than it is a comfort knowing my hands do not harbour the imagined pathogens that my head has made up. Purell Kills 99.9% of Germs. Do you also give yourself an extra, illogical pump for the 0.1% that was missed?
In all truth, I cannot help but feel a little insulted on behalf of myself and countless others because of how quickly the world was able to adapt to a remote, touchless existence, when it was convinced it couldn’t before. All the jolts of anxiety that have kept my mind busy as I’ve navigated life suddenly confused by the people around me adhering to my once irrational beliefs. You put your masks on when leaving your house, sanitize your hands after touching doors, but I’m genuinely curious; do you do it because you want the virus to wither and die and forget how to spread or do you suddenly feel the fear that I have for so long? Do you feel contaminated when you touch doors and gas pumps and debit machines? Has this life changed you?
Have you noticed how quick the switch was, yet how inaccessible it seemed before? How many people were told they couldn’t learn or work from home before, only to have their entire officeclassroomworkspace migrate into their living room maybe dining room maybe bedroom with condescending ease. How easy was it for you to adjust to a life conscious of the spread of disease, how easy to adapt and forget? Have you, too, forgotten? I see friends go out to restaurants and parties and cannot help but think differently of them, wonder what they see in the case numbers that I don’t. Is my brain still utterly irrational? Am I still subscribing to thoughts that don’t apply to the 99% of people with minds who don’t get stuck on repeat?
It’s a very odd time for obsessive-compulsive brains. On one hand, our minds are paradoxically being catered to. Our environment is being sterilized much to our liking, shaking hands is a currently dead custom (finally), we have what may be the best excuse to stay locked in our homes for an inordinate amount of time. On the other hand, new fears, upgraded, leveled up, reveal their ugly, malformed faces to us, prepared to fill empty shoes. A cough makes us shiver, a new case in our health region makes us retrace our steps, a tickle in our throat convinces us of the worst. Above all else, we watch helplessly as so many of those around us pretend it isn’t a problem. They close their eyes when the case counts rise and the age demographics drop and the bars stay open and the ones who do care try our hardest to prevent spread for what? For who? How can we help ourselves and others when service workers who have no choice but to risk exposure cannot vet who they come into contact with? When public buildings are vandalized with calls for freedom, undoubtedly written by a member of the freest demographic in this country. The freest there are call for their freedom to spread a virus while ignoring civil rights movements scattered across the world. How do you juggle all of these things happening at once? How do you process this information?
2020 has been the horror film in which I watch an irrational fear of the air becoming an unsafe place become a rational one. Suddenly, I’m the sane one for sanitizing my groceries when I bring them home. I’m the sane one for feeling anxiety around sick people, being afraid of hospitals, questioning who has touched the pen at the bank today. This newfound sanity, however, is perhaps overshadowed by the sheer insanity of the year we’re living in. While the chaos that has enveloped us in this year has been overwhelmingly negative, it has shown us all that even in crisis, we still adapt. It’s true, it started with fires and then plagues and then reminded us of civil unrest and then continued into in-real-life political satire and now we are being reminded of plagues once again, but we’re adapting, living in a new, bastardized version of “normal”; you’re reading a blog post in a writing class from a classmate that you will not see in real life this year, perhaps ever in your studies, though you’ve heard more of her real thoughts than many others have or probably ever will.
“Chaos is merely order waiting to be deciphered”- José Saramargo
The chaos that this year has brought us has not been kind to anyone, but I have had an especially tumultuous relationship with it. The paradox of being comforted by a more sterile environment because of its origin in a pandemic that I’m living through makes sense to nobody, least of all me. It seems to me like there’s a race going on in my head for every new bit of positive or negative information to get cancelled out before it can make a discernible impact on me besides resting normal. 2020 is a toxic partner that apologizes for their wrongdoings before I can get angry enough at them, promising to do better next time. I tell myself that our relationship is coming to an end soon, that 2021 will be kindergentlersofter, but a part of me believes that she hides a personality much like 2020. I wonder if we will all learn to simply live in this disarray as it comes to us; if chaos will be the new resting heart rate of life. For now, however, when 2020 apologizes and presents me with false comforts, sanitized door handles and strangers wearing masks and rejected handshakes, I will feel sane for a moment and I welcome this new temporary sanity with open arms for however long it lasts.