Published March 13, 2023
Full disclosure: I wrote what was supposed to be the first sentence of this post in my head five times and forgot it five times, so please allow me to apologize for this sloppy start. It will have to be good enough, because I can’t even remember the point I’d hoped to make right out of the gate.
My fingers are trembling because it’s cold inside my studio apartment. There’s no heat; late Friday night, I discovered a gas leak (the fifth or sixth in a handful of years), and the problem was too complicated to be fixed quickly, so the gas was shut off. If any of my brain fog owes to being almost constantly in the presence of — and sleeping within a few feet of — a gas leak, I wouldn’t know how much of that to attribute to the gas and how much to attribute to these past three years.
Oh, right. Three years. I remember now.
We filled out and signed forms with the specs of our personal laptops or computers, along with the rules and policies, and went home to do our jobs there rather than in the newspaper office. It was Friday, March 13, 2020. The coronavirus was real, and it was all around us.
A month or two later, an editor speculated that we’d all be back in the newsroom by July. I had read about the pandemic of 1918 and beyond and thought 2023 sounded more realistic, but I didn’t say anything. By late January 2021, I no longer worked for the local paper. I’d taken a remote job with another company, where I still work as of this writing.
Where things stand on March 13, 2023: Some people at the paper work in the newsroom (and have for many months), and some still work at home. Some are in other states now, having demonstrated there is no real need to be in an office or even in the same time zone. Some work elsewhere.
Before writing this, I asked an editor friend what she was going to do to love and be good to herself Sunday. We had been talking about how sometimes, to be kind to ourselves, it helps to think of ourselves as a person we like or love and want to do good things for, rather than to think of ourselves as ourselves. That is especially true if we have any tendency toward or history of not being kind or gentle with ourselves. Later, she turned my question back on me.
“What are you doing today to love and be good to Carly?”
“I am going to put on some music,” I said, “and then sit and write something, and although it’s a something that is literally three years in the making (my pandemic prison began March 13, 2020), I am going to try to write it from a place of love and not a place of panic and fear. And from a place of gratitude for knowing you.”
Easier said than done, the part about not writing it from a place of panic and fear. I am at the front end of the second of at least three weeks off work, an unplanned break for my physical, mental and emotional health. (That’s all I will say about that in the absence of legal advice, and perhaps it’s already too much. But right now I am limping along on fumes.)
And here I am, one, two, three, four … 11 paragraphs in, and I haven’t gotten to the point. Maybe that’s because there doesn’t seem to be a point to any of this. True, that sounds like it could have been said during any existential crisis in any decade, but the COVID-19 pandemic has taken that to another level for me and for many others. We’re still here; what now? Maybe the only point is to continue to survive, which has been my priority since Day 1 of this thing.
One of the problems with writing a headline/title for a blog post before writing the post (which I did) is that it can be difficult to write your way to making your headline make sense if along the way you lose your way. And, well, there’s this fog, you see, and …
Many deaths and major health complications later, the world is still grappling with this thing. Early reports of the suffering of people in their final days were enough to convince me to do whatever was necessary to stay alive and to try not to contract COVID. As far as I know, I have succeeded. As far as I know, I am still alive. It’s just not living, it’s not a life, and I know this. But, as always, there are reasons for this.
My car was stolen — twice — in the first year and a half of the pandemic. My rent went up — twice — in the past year and a half. The building I live in is like a dorm, with inside entry to units, and for me to go outside I have to navigate 80 feet of unventilated hallway where mostly unmasked people come and go. What they breathe into that hallway isn’t visible to me, but it might harm me, and I have no way of knowing whether it’s fresh or all but quieted down hours later. (When did I last hear people out there?) Doing laundry requires an even longer walk to an unventilated laundry room downstairs. To simply go for a walk outside, there is risk that was not there in 2018 and 2019. I have been double masking for years.
My body has suffered because of a dramatic drop in physical movement since my switch to a fully remote work environment with the health constraints I mentioned above. Moving has not been an option because rents elsewhere have skyrocketed throughout the region. States where rents are more affordable are not an option for me: Much of the world, and especially this country’s political climate, became a hostile place for transgender people in the past couple of years, seemingly out of nowhere. I’ve had to hunker down for more than one reason.
There is not much to do or spend money on except for increasingly more expensive food and health care. There are few places that feel safe to me anymore, including this building, where car prowls, break-ins and vandalism have gotten so bad, they’ve installed bright lights that shine on the cars and the parking lot. Given my risk factors and the uncertainty of what the future holds, saving as much money as possible seems like a good idea. That’s gotten harder three years into this.
I knew that this country had so many people who couldn’t be bothered to care about vulnerable people or do even the bare minimum to help protect them, but I wasn’t prepared for having to see that demonstrated stubbornly, angrily, day after day for years.
Given the chance to go back in time, would I change anything? Probably not. Or maybe I’d change everything. I am not nearly as naive as I used to be about the people around me and how little they care about those who are different than they are. I know better than ever that evil doesn’t look like the monsters in my nightmares or in horror movies but more frequently arrives in its Sunday best headed to or from the church of its choice, having learned to remain a member in good standing by saying all the right words. In many circles, the talk is enough; there’s no need to walk the walk. In some, the chance to inflict cruelty on others is the reward for faithfully performing the cosplay.
Two people began screaming at me and recording me with a phone last week after I pulled into a big lot in front of a store and parked in the space in front of them. Because I never got out of the car, they did not see my size and shape, just gorgeous silver hair on a head whose face I had mostly, carefully covered with a mask. One of them opened their door, and I could hear the other one screaming as I slowly backed out and drove away. Was it because I was masked? That was my guess. Or did they somehow deduce that I’m trans? It doesn’t really matter. I didn’t feel safe, and I went back home.
Sometimes there’s no happy ending for us, there are only the choices that allow us to hold on for as long as possible before one of the tragic endings finds us. That seems to be where I am now, trying to hold on. I have been in almost complete isolation for more than half of the days that I’ve been openly transgender, and most of my transition goals are beyond my reach now. If I can make a day a good day, I try, but that’s becoming harder all the time. Enemies, and those who enable and amplify them, are closer to me than I ever expected. They have done more to put obstacles between me and my goals than anything the pandemic has done, and it’s scary how little I can do about that.
What I can do, what I’ve worked hard to do, what I’ve suffered and struggled with mightily, is to try to avoid dying the kind of death I’ve associated with COVID since the first few months of the pandemic. I am closer to the end of my life than to the beginning, and that much I’ve decided. Other than that, my central preoccupation is to end this life well, asking myself every day what that looks like in areas where I have a choice. And yes, I choose to continue to protect myself from airborne transmission of that which can kill me or ensure that my final days are filled with even more pain than I am experiencing now.
About the featured image atop this post, and as I wrote when this thing hit 1,000 days: For brevity’s sake, I chose the term “straight days of remote status” as shorthand for several things. It means “consecutive days of mostly being inside my tiny apartment. Consecutive days of living in a pandemic. No office to go to. The absence of daily interaction with people in the flesh. Consistent and necessary precautions to keep myself from harm. And so much more.
Until today, I had not written anything here since then, a span of three months and a few days. There didn’t seem to be a point. There didn’t seem to be anything to say.
And now, after using a whole lot of words to say there’s still not much to say, I am veering dangerously close to writing from a place of panic and fear instead of from a place of love, so I should probably call it a day. That’s Day 1,094 in a row, if you’re counting.
I have marked the passage of time. I suppose that’s something.