On grief and loneliness during the coronavirus
I feel like all I’ve been doing is grieving lately, and I’m not sure how to move on from that. The 5 stages of grief are bullshit amongst everything that’s happening right now. How am I supposed to get to acceptance when the very things that scare me are surrounding me every day? I’m lonely; I’m scared of that. I don’t want to die; I’m scared I might. I’m scared other people that I love will. I’m scared that I’ll live, and we’ll all live, but we’ll be living in a world we don’t want to live in. At the very beginning of this, in early March, I read a personal essay that wasn’t about this at all but had the phrase “I guess a clock ticks over Seattle” in it and I’d just heard the news that Seattle was one of the most dangerous places to be as far as the virus at that point and all I could do was cry. It keeps hitting me at the most random times and I keep circling back, being afraid to die, being afraid to live, being afraid to stay in this limbo of living but not living, and being so terribly lonely I’m not sure if I’m still alive at all. What’s the point of keeping busy until it’s over if there’s no guarantee that it’s going to be over?
Today is a bad day. I know this, logically. Today I cleaned my room and cleaned out my closed and organized for an hour and a half and then cried about the pointlessness of it all because I didn’t feel the slightest bit better, just more tired. I know not all days are bad days, but on the bad days it feels like there isn’t a single good day in the future, and I don’t want that to be true. I’m afraid that I’m going to lose all the people I’m quarantined with because we’ll all be sick of each other by the end of it, and I love them dearly, and I don’t know what I’d do if I didn’t have them in my life. Even though I’m sick of them. Even though I’m locked in my room with the fan on as loud as possible so I don’t have to hear them. It’s surprising how alone you can feel when you’re trapped with other people. And I’m terribly frustrated because this is so raw and isn’t even well-written, but what can I do when everything hurts so very much?