The pandemic ate me alive

Not all of us got out of the pandemic alive. I look in the mirror as I get ready for work and I’m careful not to make direct eye contact with the being looking back at me. I don’t want to see their eyes. I don’t want to see their pain, because it is my pain too. If I look in the mirror, I will have to admit that I lost; that we lost, and that perhaps, we are still losing.

And we don’t even know what we fucking lost.

It’s not hard to recall who I was before covid times. I was a ghost, but I was blending in. I was discovering my passion for my job as a language teacher. I was discovering that I was somewhat good at it. I worked hard. I’d work late and for no pay. I’d go the extra mile even if no one asked me to. I wanted everyone to speak the tribal language that I'd painstakingly learned. I’d go out of my way to help people, no matter the request. I didn’t keep typical teacher hours; you could reach me at four in the morning if you needed to. That’s how dedicated I was to my ancestral language.

Well, that person’s dead and gone. That person hasn’t been seen in like, two years, so there’s that.

For starters, I wasn’t in quarantine for a long time. I heard some people were in quarantine for six months, possibly longer. Not me. They told me to come back to work after three months. I could have held out until August but I went back in June 2020 because that’s what pre-covid Suge would do.

Pre-covid Suge was *such* a brown noser. She wanted everyone to see what a good job she was doing and how dedicated an employee she was. Gag. No one ever saw what she did so it was all for nothing.

My first day back at work, I realized how different I was. Not everyone in our department came back at the same time. It was a bit staggered. Like I said, I could have been one of the staggered ones but they asked me back and I felt like I had to come back. LIKE I HAD TO. By whom? No idea. It just felt like I had to do it. Going back to work during a pandemic in 2020 was so surreal that it feels fake.

My anxiety was heinous. I was suddenly interacting with people I had mostly been talking with via text. I always had poor social skills but they seemed to have gotten worse during quarantine. At some point in quarantine, I took off the many masks I wear to get by in daily life. Well, I took off those metaphorical masks and replaced them with a physical one.

I was adamant about the masks. I was wearing a mask while noting that others would sometimes forget. I would shut the door to my office (only to be reprimanded for shutting my office door). I tried to cut myself off from people. I was afraid of getting sick and getting the people I love sick. Therefore, when people came and talked to me, I backed away from them. Everyone was so happy to get out of the house but I felt like I was the only one who realized we were still in a pandemic.

I’m mentally ill, in case you were wondering. I have Dissociative Identity Disorder (which I will now call DID because I’m not typing that out every god damn time). You might be familiar with DID by its former name, Multiple Personality Disorder. DID is characterized by frequent dissociation by a person (or what I like to call the Host Body) and the development of Alters (not personalities. Alters. Saying ‘personalities’ sounds as if they’re different facets of me. I never view them that way. These Alter’s have their own names and their own personality traits. They’re like different people living in my head). DID develops as a result of extreme or constant childhood trauma.

I developed DID because I was sexually abused for most of my childhood and that fractured and splintered my mind into different Alters. Someday, I’ll write something on my DID and my Alters but today is not that day. I just wanted to aware everyone.

When I was home safe in quarantine, I wasn’t having a great time. I was constantly nervous and edgy and I even stopped sleeping for a time. I discovered that when left to my own devices, I would pretty much just not sleep ever. I never got tired, it seemed. I would get consumed with various projects or books. This led to me switching from one Alter to another quite rapidly. It was like someone put my head on shuffle.

By the way, at this time I didn’t see my therapist for six months because he was supposed to email me back about rescheduling a canceled appointment and he never did. I should have followed up with him but at the time, I was like “Well I don’t want to bug him…” I’m dumb sometimes.

Clearly, I was going through some turmoil. You see, I am a creature of habit. I don’t like change unless the change is my idea. That sounds really conceited now that I’ve put that out there but you know what I mean. I have to want to change for me to really make a valiant effort for change. If change is forced on me, I break. And when I got back to work, a lot of change was forced on me.

My in-person classes had to change to online classes. The way I interacted with my coworkers was different (I did everything via phone calls and emails and on a few occasions, text messages). I used to go out for smoke breaks with people and I stopped doing that. Instead of going out to eat, I’d grab a coffee and just drive around for an hour. I took numerous bathroom breaks to go and cry. I couldn't get a grip on things.

I can never pinpoint what I was crying about. Sometimes it was nothing and sometimes it was everything. I wanted to go back into quarantine where I felt safe. I didn’t think anyone cared how I felt about the state of the world in the 2020 pandemic.

And I was right. Because I’m no one. What I think does not matter. Not in the grand scheme of this colonized, capitalist world. And that fucking pissed me off.

I was mostly angry because my life could be bartered with. Regardless of comorbidities, regardless of how harsh or light the covid symptoms could be, I was angry that I (and many, many others) was in a situation where I could get sick and possibly die.

In quarantine, I had a lot of time to think. It made me look at everything with a different lens. Depending on who you asked, I was either “woke” or I was “hateful.” I was neither. I was fucking aggravated.

I started asking why I put one hundred percent of myself into a job that left me so exhausted after my eight hours that the only option was isolation or a nap (this is how I felt pre-covid times and current covid times). The language fed my soul but nothing else about this job did. There was a certain way I wanted to do my classes and I was denied that opportunity.

I felt useless. I felt like a joke. I stopped trying to impress anyone. Maybe I was careless, or maybe I was tired of being seen as an insignificant cog in some grand machine.

I stopped working late without pay. I stopped going above and beyond. I did my job, but I didn’t overdo it. I wasn’t trying for promotions. I wasn’t trying to get in with the cool crowd. I would come to work, sit in my office, teach my classes, and then go home.

This wasn’t limited to work. My small social life suffered as well. I found myself bereft of friendships. It was disheartening, but my depression told me that it was better this way. We didn’t need friends. We ruined people anyways.

When everything started to open back up, everyone was so glad that the pandemic was over, even though it wasn’t. Us little people would work and the rich people would play. Privilege will get you anything in this world and if you aren’t privileged, you work your ass off for nothing, except maybe an early grave.

Social media started to annoy me and I took a hefty step back from it because I couldn't stand seeing people get sick after going to a super spreader event (seriously, what did you expect?).

Social media was repulsive to me. If I suddenly disappeared from all my social media platforms, I don’t think too many people would notice. As I said before, I am a ghost. I am forgotten almost daily in various ways.

At some point, I became melancholy for the way my life used to be. My life was a fucking train wreck, but there were things I loved to do. I loved sitting in diners, reading and writing. I loved to go to Alki Beach by Seattle and watch the sunset. I missed comicon. I missed the little things I used to do to cheer myself up. I don’t cheer myself up that often anymore. All the things I want to do, I feel like I can’t.

Sure, maybe it’s a pointless fear for some, but this is what mentally ill people are going through. The few times I’ve been able to set foot in a store, I notice that I am constantly hurrying about and wandering about, trying to avoid being in one spot for too long. I come off as frantic and rude. I just can’t stand being in the presence of other people for too long.

I didn’t think about how much this pandemic affected me until I got my performance evaluation at work. Then I felt like a fucking failure of a person! To say the very least, it wasn’t the best evaluation I’d ever gotten. For the first time, I was looking at how my mental illness was playing out to everyone else that I worked with. And it made me want to kill myself.

I kept telling myself that I wasn’t like this before. I kept telling myself that it wasn’t entirely my fault. This world, this continent, this country, this tribe had failed me by seeing me as a number and not a person. I was shown in various ways just how little I mattered. How do you remain free of depression after that?

The fun thing about DID is that I’m not always aware of how bad it gets until other people start pointing it out. When things get uncomfortable and testy, I become what I call the Blank Slate, in which there is no Alter in control. We are on autopilot. Everything is automatic. Someone might take control but mostly, no one does. We just sit there, staring off into space, lost in our own head, a complete husk devoid of life.

Every day was a challenge to get to work on time. Or to wake up on time. I struggled to give any kind of a shit about the work I was doing. Everything felt so bleak. I began asking the question “What does it matter if this gets done?” And I asked that question of everything.

I’m a recovering self-mutilator and I started hurting myself again. The rigid set of rules I had for myself disappeared and I denied myself nothing if it would give me one moment of joy. I ignored health issues. Who cared if I was sick? No one noticed me at work when I was full of panic and paranoia and trying to keep it together. If I had a physical ailment, they would ignore that too. And they did. Because I’m a ghost.

I didn’t do things that I enjoyed. For a time I’d come home and pass out on the couch. Sleep was always touch and go with me, and I noticed that after a full day of working in the pandemic, I was more susceptible to sleep than I would be at a normal bed time.

I felt lost. I still feel lost. I am still in the thick of it. I have to force myself to do anything else other than sleep or play video games. Have you ever been that level of depressed where you have to force yourself to do some beadwork or do some writing or to do laundry or wash dishes or take care of your goddamn cat? It’s like someone put a thousand weighted blankets on me and now I have to drag myself around doing my chores, pretending that they aren't weighing me down and suffocating me.

I am still this way. I am still trying to get better. I am un-medicated (there’s no pills for DID but I’m un-medicated for my anxiety and depression and ADHD). Everything feels so impossible. It feels like nothing has changed. And nothing will change about how this country is run because there are too many rich white people in charge. No one is thinking about me or people like me and how life can be made easier for us.

The pandemic is still ongoing. I keep saying this. If the pandemic was truly over, I don’t think I’d be wearing a mask to work every day. Hospitals still wouldn’t be full of people sick and dying from covid. I don’t think we ever even reached herd immunity with the vaccine.

Society wants us to keep going because without all of us, their little machine crumbles. And there’s nothing we can do because the little people will be penalized a lot more than the rich people. No one wants to quit. No one wants to stop working. No one wants to not have food or heat or a place to live. And that’s what us commoners face if we just abandoned our jobs.

Rich people want you to forget that there’s a pandemic going on. They want to show off their wonderful lives to you because they’re all ego maniacs. They don’t give a shit about you. You’re nothing to them. We don’t matter to them at any level and I think it’s time we stop kidding ourselves that so-and-so celebrity adores us because we support their movies/music/books/politics/whatever the fuck. At the end of the day, I still have to work in a department that has been hit several times by covid, and rich people get to go on vacations around the world as though nothing was happening.

The privilege is exhaustingly disgusting. And there’s nothing none of us can do about it other than what we’re told. And it’s wrecking my mental health, but nobody gives a shit about that because we have to make money for a larger entity. Everyone does.

If I had killed myself during the pandemic, my position would be re-advertised. That’s just the way it is in capitalism. People aren’t going to mourn me the way people will mourn Betty White. All this world has taught me is that I’m nothing and that I need to be okay with being nothing.

Who has the energy for that?