#twf: bad vibes wrt covid

[thatgirlwhokeepsreading]

Prefacing this with the fact that my father is in the minority of people who catch glandular fever (Epstein-Barr virus) and just… never actually recover from it? Like I knew my entire childhood that if dad was sick it was more likely than not the glandular fever back at it again. It was (and still is) kind of this unspoken thing so I honestly don’t know much beyond that, like when he actually first caught it or what triggered flare ups (I think it was overwork and/or getting another illness, which is common), but I did know that it basically meant that every couple of years I’d wake up I’d one day and it would be like “oop Dad’s in Chronic Fatigue Mode I guess”

It was strange learning recently that most people actually don’t have these long term effects from glandular fever (although many more people report fatigue for months after the virus has in theory cleared and they are no longer infectious). For me, the long game of a disease that never goes away defines how I think about glandular fever.

Y’all know where I’m going with this, yadda yadda covid + long covid. I’m just so fucking exhausted, and so angry.

I’m mad that richer countries took the vaccine patents and enabled the new variants to develop. I’m mad that these variants are all billed as being “not as bad” even when we don’t know the long term effects, and even when the earlier strains still exist.

I’ve been unbearably furious learning about the fact the virus modelling was done based on TB, and questionable advice was given on the same basis, and so now the fact that I haven’t caught it feels more like luck. I literally can’t look directly at it right now, it sends me into a rage.

I’m mad that I literally worry constantly that I caught covid but wasn’t symptomatic, or symptomatic in a way that I recognised. I’ve always been the asymptomatic carrier, from when my siblings got chicken pox to taking weeks longer to finally present with the 48hr flu my honours cohort caught last year, so why would this be any different? Every time time I get fatigued from mental health things I have the added mental exhaustion of worrying if this is it, if this is me finally presenting with long covid from covid I didn’t even know I had.

As someone who works in theatre, I’m mad that sports got to go on while my colleagues struggled with lockdowns. I’m proud of the industry for finding other routes, for scraping through by (in my neck of the woods) popularising a kind of closet theatre-esque online reading and (globally) beginning to normalise live cinema/releasing archival recordings. But I’m mad now that, with barely any relief given to the industry, people were always going to be forced back to work before they were ready.

I’m mad that I know government restrictions aren’t enough, but I don’t know what I should be doing, because I’m not an epidemiologist. I shouldn’t be the one having to make the calls about how many people I see in a week and in what settings and with what safety measures. The government should be listening to experts, that’s why we have them, that’s why they read all those nerd books and write all those nerd papers. As a queer person, I understand experts make mistakes or have other motives, but by God don’t throw the baby out with the bath water.

Also, not a new take, but it just feels so grossly unfair that I isolated myself, that myself and most of the people I know put ourselves through the hellish endurance challenge of sticking to lockdowns, and now it feels like it was for nothing. My relationship with my parents was irrevocably damaged* because I couldn’t stomach going home to see my immunocompromised mother for six months in 2020. I genuinely developed touch starvation. My graduation project for university was functionally performed to an empty room. And fuck, that all seems minor compared to what some people gave up for the greater good. And now for what? To what end?

I’m mad that spending a day in my ventilated, open-plan office at uni with five other people in a massive room has stressed me out enough that I had a covid dream last night. I’m mad that in the dream I literally was able to convince myself I was awake because the absurdity of “someone you know has covid but we won’t tell you who” isn’t that absurd anymore. I’m mad it got so bad that vector tracing was just stopped. I’m mad the reporting system is now texting people you’ve seen recently in the same way you’d have a sexual partner report back to you awkwardly about getting an STD.

I worry about the kids I tutor, I worry about catching covid from them and them from me but I don’t know what to do. I’m mad that the schoolies kids last year were billed as some of the best behaved in memory, because God knows I will never understand the appeal of schoolies, but these kids are so obviously irrevocably shaped by the trauma of a pandemic that even the most extroverted, chaotic of the bunch can’t not think about safety anymore. Kids already suffering horrific climate grief (if my tutoring kids are an indicative sample) have now got another layer of apocalypse fatigue shoved on top of that. My kids trust me to be no bullshit, and sometimes I don’t know what to tell them anymore when they ask why those in power make these decisions. They don’t care about us, simple as that, but saying that to an already traumatised kid isn’t productive.

Most of all, I’m mad that we knew this was coming. I’m mad that we knew a global pandemic like this could happen, and no one was prepared. I’m mad that there is nothing I can do, nothing I can sacrifice, no way I can set myself on fire when people vote in fucking nationalistic, conservative governments who don’t care about you. I’m mad that I can see people already forgetting what it was like to not be able to work, to need social support systems and to find them barely there. I’m mad that for years conservative governments have been able to spin Fiscal Responsibility™️ when all they were doing was gutting things we needed. I’m mad that this pervasive distrust of expertise extends so far that people will throw up their hands and say “can’t afford it” instead of saying “we need this, how can we afford it?”

I understand that there are extremely real impacts from letting a national economy go into free fall. I understand we had to open borders at some point. But people are dying, and disabled, and additionally traumatised, when we nearly made it. Two fucking years feel like they’ve been wasted and I’m angry, angry, so fucking angry.

*to be fair, I now realise that I’d actually stumbled into some spicy enmeshment stuff, but it would have been logistically better in the long term if that break from seeing each other was like… intentional. (My parents now treat any attempts to unenmesh as a sign of a mental health crisis and it Drives Me Up The Wall.)