Pandemic: Thoughts from May to July 2020

Title

Description

A description and thoughts about what it has been like to live through the COVID-19 pandemic, adjusting to working from home, and anxieties about the time.

Coverage

Greenville, North Carolina

Creator

Anonymous

Date

2020-07-22

Text

"I think sometimes when the future is most up in the air I feel the most free. I am of course mourning like everyone else the loss of feeling secure in my job, my husband’s job, my sister’s business closing, all these things - but I’m at the point where I am so incredibly broken down that I’m just grateful for my health and my husband beside me everyday and that my family is doing okay. I know that could be taken away too, but for today I feel content. I am trying to be a better person. I feel like I’ve been crying more of happiness lately feeling grateful than I have been from sadness. If nothing else at least this is showing me what really matters - and it isn’t amassing wealth at the expense of others or sitting back doing nothing. At any point in your life you can wake up and stop worrying and try to enjoy small moments. It is so much easier to not care about money and being in the rat race when you are on the verge of losing everything."

I wrote the above on May 14, 2020. It's now July 22, 2020. We're still in this, and still the case counts are rising. The CDC has said the case count is probably vastly underreported and that herd immunity has yet to be established. As a health sciences librarian at ECU's Laupus Library I have felt hyperaware of everything that is going on and of course had much anxiety about the pandemic and its effects. My husband was working at the Bicycle Post in Greenville and it has now closed. Not due to the pandemic – the owner just didn't want to run the shop anymore after his mother passed away. But job loss seems abundant still. I worry for the town and the university and hope everything and all the local businesses can keep going. But I worry more about the public health crisis and the polarized nature of the debate around the virus rather than just wearing a mask because it is a public health initiative that would help everyone. I feel like I'm looking out of a window and not understanding what is happening because I have access to all the medical literature and updated information and others do not.
For us, we've mostly been at home except when my husband has had to leave to go to work before. It makes me feel safer to be at home, and I am grateful my job is letting me stay home and telework. It has been a huge adjustment. I feel like having gone through things in my life like moving overseas before and making big adjustments like that has made me a very flexible person, but I'm still struggling. We recently made a trip out to Asheville because we just had to get out of the house. We social distanced and only spent time outside and wearing a mask while we were there. It was wonderful to go somewhere for a bit but it tended to make me realize how much we've lost and how things won't be going back to normal for some time.
I still feel the above statement to be true – the pandemic has made me focus on the things that really matter and cherish the little things like eating a fresh blueberry outside or hiking in the fresh air. It has also given me more time to read and learn and support movements like the anti-racist Black Lives Matter movement and attend the White Coats for Black Lives march which was held on June 26th, 2020 on the health sciences campus. I feel like the movement has been caught up inextricably with the pandemic, at least in my mind, as so many minority groups are being exposed to COVID-19 at higher rates and health disparities are affecting many right now. I'm still hopeful for the future and that we can do better. But I am also settled in for the long haul of working from home for the foreseeable future and living like this possibly into 2021 and longer.

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