An Ending, A Beginning

Well, guys, it happened. Two years into it and I finally got Covid!

I’m writing to you from the other side of what was, in terms of physical symptoms, an ordinary time. I’m feeling healthy, back to normal, and most of all, extremely (extremely!) lucky to have had such a mild course of it. Blessings to the vaccines, to Tylenol and Dayquil, to Gatorade and herbal tea, to hot baths. It was akin to a bad cold, with some extra anxiety layered on top, because I was tracking my symptoms like a hawk. Odds are good that you’ve had Covid by this point too, and there’s honestly not a lot to write home about in terms of the physical progression. But the emotional-mental-spiritual progression! Oh boy. I was texting with a friend during that week, giving her all my highs and lows, and she said: “I see a blog post coming out of this.” Reader, she was right.

I was in San Francisco when I began to feel lousy. I’d come to town for Easter weekend to be with a dear friend. Our first day together was a glorious one, a day of sunshine and walks and long meals and soul-filling conversation. Then I went to bed, and then I woke up feeling crappy (sore throat, slight fever). I took a test and there it was, a line so faint I could barely see it, but a line nonetheless. I should say that this development was pretty unsurprising. I’d been out and about in New York in the preceding days, dinners and work events and other things, and cases have been on the rise in the city, and other friends have been testing positive, and it was bound to happen eventually. I’d taken those risks knowing they were risks. And I think this was crucial for me to bear in mind: that I couldn’t be too aggrieved by this development. (Because that would beg the question: aggrieved with whom? Aggrieved by what?) It was a situation of my own making.

I was supposed to fly home at the end of the weekend, but that obviously wasn’t going to happen, so I changed my flight and made a new hotel reservation. I was going to be alone, hunkered down in a hotel room, for a long while. At first glance, this was sort of depressing. But while I was Facetiming with my mom, the reframe occurred to me. I’d been craving some quiet time, right? I’d been wanting to buckle down on revisions to my new novel, right? Right! “Maybe this is a good thing!” I said. “I’m going to view this as a writing retreat. I’ll feel bad for 24 hours and then I’ll probably feel better and then I’m going to get so much work done.”

This was my mantra. I kept telling my family and friends that it was fine, don’t worry, I was just pretending this was a writing retreat! There is a kind of optimism that borders on derangement, and I am definitely afflicted by this. The FT had a good article about this, which two family members separately sent to me in the span of 24 hours (my brand is strong, I guess). It’s the pathological search for silver linings, the ability to spin literally anything into a positive.

I don’t really know why I am the way I am. A happenstance of genetics, upbringing, wider life experiences, who knows. I’ve pretty much always been this way, but several years ago I learned the price of such deranged optimism, which is that it can—sometimes—mask real pain. I learned what many people have learned before, which is that if pain is ignored for too long, it will rear up and exact vengeance and it will charge a usurious interest rate. A confluence of factors caused me to slow down and learn some of these things. It was helpful to know that I had this pattern of deranged optimism. It was helpful to identify it as a pattern, which is to say, as an entity separate from me. I got better—not necessarily good, but certainly better—at checking in with myself. I did all of the things that people always tell you to do. I began to meditate, to keep a journal, to take deep breaths, to go for walks. I thought about my faith. I tried new things. It helped, a lot.

My deranged optimism wasn’t gone, not by any stretch. She was just, let’s say, balanced out by other internal forces. Sometimes she took a backseat, but she was there for me when I needed her. One of the scary things about letting yourself change is wondering whether you have to say goodbye to your former selves. You have tenderness for those selves. You were those selves. Is it right to judge them, to cast aspersions on them? But this, I think, is a misconception. You don’t say goodbye to them. They are still part of you. You learn to hold them more lightly. To say to them: thank you, I love you, but it’s okay. You can take a break.

**

Those first few days of my hotel isolation, I got a little bit of writing done. Not much. I was pretty congested and tired, and just as the congestion seemed to be improving, then it suddenly got worse. After a few days of progress, I’d had this little setback. I wasn’t getting better. I panicked! I wondered when I’d be able to go home.

My hotel room, up on the 46th floor, had this beautiful view of the South Bay. I spent a lot of time (so much time!) staring out the window. The container ships, the piers, the Bay Bridge, the Sales Force tower. I was safe and secure. I was aware of my insane luck, my luck in this specific situation, my luck in world-historical terms. And yet I was also aware of the strangeness of my situation, living high up in this room, repeating 24-hour cycles, the world busy and bustling below.

And then, several days in, when I had that little setback, the sense of strangeness began to predominate. I felt far away from the world, a slight unreality, a shaky uncertainty, and this freaked me out. I called Andrew and cried for a while, and then decided to make one of those telehealth appointments. Twenty minutes later, I was talking to Dr. P. I described to her my symptoms and situation. She listened, and asked several questions, and offered me the reassurance I hadn’t realized I’d been needing so badly. She was tired—you could see it in her eyes—but even in her tiredness, she was so kind. And it was like that kindness caused something in me to unclench. I could just let go, completely, into what I was feeling.

And after that catharsis (a nice long bout of tears, a hot bath, a cup of tea) I felt so much better. Strangely, I felt a sense of empowerment. I had taken back my agency. Talking to Dr. P hadn’t actually changed the facts on the ground. But in the act of making that appointment, of realizing I needed an authority figure to tell me what to do, I had taken back some measure of control. We had a plan: I would check back in if I got worse. Following CDC guidelines, I would fly home on X day. It was that combination—my reaching out, her responding with kindness, us figuring out the next steps—that allowed me to turn the corner on the week.

I was originally in San Francisco to attend my friend’s baptism, which took place on Holy Saturday. I had so badly wanted to show up for her in this big moment. But, instead, she was showing up for me. She dropped off soup and fresh fruit and tea. She took care of me. Later, when I was on the mend, she met me for masked and distanced walks, tracing the edges of the city. We walked and talked, we walked and talked; in the end we squeezed in as much quality time as we’d originally allotted, if not more. On the last evening, the day before my flight home, we walked through Golden Gate Park to the Pacific Ocean. I ran up to the water, because the ocean always makes me run like a little kid, and I felt happy. I just felt so happy. I told her that this had wound up being the perfect week; that I had gotten from it exactly what I needed.

**

For the longest time, there has been the question of how this pandemic ends. One variant follows another, and there are different risk levels, and there are different needs. Lately I’ve found myself doing the things I used to do back in 2019—going out to dinner, going to parties, seeing friends, planning trips—and it’s like part of me has moved on, but part of me is still emerging from the pandemic mindset, from the world-altering slowness of 2020. Despite the craziness, the past two years have also allowed me time to be quiet; to reflect; to think deliberately about the life I want. It’s been useful. I find myself wondering if I am ready to reenter the arena.

But there was something about this past week—it slapped me awake. Occasionally I would venture out (wearing my mask, keeping my distance!) and find a bench on the Embarcadero, down by the water, far from other people, and sit in the sunshine and read for a bit. From where I sat, I could hear the clock in the ferry building announcing the hour. The sound was like a bell chiming during meditation: it caused me to look up from my book, to notice the world around me. My distance was purposeful, the shields of my mask, my baseball hat, my book. It was good to know what that distance felt like, what it felt like, in a visceral sense. In a way I sorely needed, the experience was slapping me back into the reality of the world.

I don’t know why, but this past week felt like a punctuation: the ending of something, the beginning of something else.

When I was harping on about my Covid writing retreat, my friends and family indulged me and nodded along, but I could tell they thought I was being a little crazy. I thought I was being a little crazy. (I mean, Anna! Calm down! Just take some Dayquil and watch TV like a normal person!) But I had to be. Sometimes I tell myself things—I project hope into the void of the future, I see sadness and call it good—and I don’t entirely believe what I’m saying, but I try to believe it nonetheless, because, on the deepest level, this is the way I know how to live. I keep trying, because if nothing else, I’m good at trying.

Over the past few months I’ve been working my way through The Red Book, Carl Jung’s hallucinatory masterpiece, a book which speaks to my soul. (Sometimes I will write more about this!) I drink my coffee and hang out with my Swiss buddy for a while, and it’s one of my favorite parts of the day. Just this morning, I read this line, which seems to fit with what I’m saying above: “So if it is a deception, then deception is my God.”

That silver lining may or may not be real. But you have to walk inside the cloud in order to see it for yourself. So you set your feet in that direction, and when you falter, you tell yourself whatever you need to tell yourself in order to keep walking.