By: Revanche

Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (281)

October 20, 2025

Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area

Year 6, Day 175: Friday me: we won’t need to turn on the heat for another month, it doesn’t get all that cold here.

Today me: Freezing, looking for my cozy socks. Sigh. I wonder how much of this storm is responsible for how terrible I’ve felt for the past several days. I feel this kid’s message. But 7 days, not just 3. I’m so over work and unbelievably high pressure.

We have a table of weird dimensions so when I wanted a replacement tablecloth, an hour of hunting only produced a whole lot of irritation that nothing would fit for a reasonable amount of money. Instead I bought 6 different cotton fabrics ($60) and have sewn 4 lengths of them into 2 tablecloths. One more to go. They aren’t QUITE wide enough to overlap more than a couple inches on the long side so they are almost like overgrown table runners but that’s totally fine. They cover the table enough and they didn’t cost $50 each! Bonus, I picked a fabric with a map of the states on it because I can never remember where all the states are and figured the kids could learn some geography. They haven’t yet but they like playing a game using the states with PiC over dinner so that’s a win. I did just notice they never figure out how to put Hawaii and Alaska in there which is a darn shame.

Year 6, Day 176: PiC is concerned about my stress levels which is … fair. My rage (at work, but contained away from work people) has been consistently high which means my depression is taking over. The problem is I’m not really sure what else I can do about it. I’m on my meds, doing therapy weekly, trying to carve out tiny bits of time for myself to decompress amidst the too muchness of it all. I bought myself juice boxes for tiny doses of juice sugar. I eat when I feel hungry (midmorning) and eat less when I don’t (most meals).

I do know the dead garden and lack of dogs is steadily grinding away at my nerves. The putter in the garden was stabilizing, so is playing with a dog. But the intense pain days and fatigue chasers make it really hard to borrow a big dog and the garden, well. “She’s dead, Jim.”

Except for the potatoes. I’ve been in too much pain to dig potatoes for the past month but today I had wrapped my back in a heating pad for several hours which left me capable enough to dig a small bucket of new potatoes. That digging in the dirt is strangely therapeutic in a small way even if I didn’t come up with as many potatoes as I had wanted to see.

Year 6, Day 177: PiC asks every other day what he can do to lighten my load but he can’t remove this work related Sword of Damocles over my head and everything else is almost inconsequential compared to it. He’s already prepping almost all our meals and handling all the kid dropoffs. The crushing anxiety and fear of what happens if I can’t get this ship to harbor (work), or if the world’s falling apart continues apace and we can’t stop it, preys on my mind every minute of the day.

Courtney Milan said this in her recent newsletter: I went through a period of despair and hopelessness in my late teens and early twenties, spanning the first and second times I failed out of college. I don’t want to go into details, but I often thought that it was impossible for things to get better, and there were some years where it felt like I was right. I wondered, often, if there was any point in hoping, because it would only inevitably lead to disappointment.

The thing that got me out of it was probably, among other things, hormonal changes settling as I came into adulthood, but also because I remember there was a point where, in the throes of despair, I made a decision: maybe everything was hopeless, but there was no way to find out for sure without trying.

So I started with the assumption that things weren’t hopeless, and I asked myself: if things aren’t hopeless, what would I do? And I did that thing, and either it worked, or I would discover that it did not work, and then I would go back and say, “okay, if things aren’t hopeless, I have just learned that a thing did not work. What do I do given that information?”

In this spirit, I’m trying a few small things.

• I pulled out the frozen marinated tritip from months ago and cooked it with the new potatoes. That helps the part of my brain that’s sad that I can’t/don’t prep dinner like I used to. Bonus: it was really good.
• PiC has a habit of buying green onions that we don’t remember to use up til it’s too late, frequently. This time, I cut off the greens and stuck the root ends in water. They sprouted magnificently on the first round, a few weeks ago, and I’ve cut them down again. What I learned from this is that I will use green onions if they are always out on the counter. Today I rather haphazardly potted those green onions and they now live on the counter. This gives me plant life.
• I’m taking my anti-depresssants a little earlier in the day. Actually, I’ve always taken them in the evening to make sure I don’t forget but maybe it would be better to take them at the start of the day. I’m not generally aware of my depression overnight, after all!

Year 6, Day 178: Brain fog has finally hit. I noticed that I’d been a little while between fogs last week, so naturally it took over my brain today. It feels like my brain has turned into cotton, or like it’s shutting down and going to sleep without the rest of me.

After an hour of steady decline, I gave myself five minutes to lay down before picking up JB from school and was perplexed to find my synopses were firing more clearly. Rest doesn’t usually help brain fog! Or, does it? I can’t remember trying to rest, only trying to push through. I’ve gotten better at bouncing from one thing to another instead of trying to force a hyper focus that’s unachievable in a fog, but never resting. So after pickup I crawled back into bed and rested another 45 minutes. I wasn’t refreshed as normal people are but it took me a long way toward my baseline. That’s when it occurred to me that it was a combination of actual brain fog and exhaustion exacerbating it. The rest helped with the latter, so I could feel the fog more clearly. Little mysteries. So fun.

Year 6, Day 179: Had myself a mini privileged person panic about money. We’re doing all the “right” things (spending our values, not spending on less important things, using things til they wear out completely, buying quality things so they last, prioritizing saving aggressively and investing aggressively, giving back to the community). The what-ifs (this time: fascism breaks everything) got me. What if we do all the right things and the world goes apocalyptic because the richest people cannot conceive of putting the planet before their profits or their whims, so it’s Mad Max and Thunderdome here in a few or several years. What earthly good would any of our years of discipline and wise management do then? All these years would have been wasted. Well, we enjoy things now but there’s been a lot of frugality where maybe we could have enjoyed things more – I could have had therapy and better health sooner! (Maybe) – if I hadn’t been so deadset on making sure our money foundation was as solid as I could make it these past 20 years.

I talked it over with a PF friend and she said she also has the same fears. Her spouse reminds her that we’ll have much bigger problems than money should Mad Max become reality.

That did not help me even a little, it just opened the door to more doomfears. I have no interest in trying to survive a post-apocalyptic world but I have a responsibility to my family to fight if we do survive. Ugh.

Also, they said, all the rich people are in the market and that’s where their wealth exists so they’re motivated not to let it disappear.

That reassured and also felt gross. I hate that our money is tied up in the same place as people who have a vested interest in the status quo so that we have a vested interest in the status quo when I very much think we need something better than capitalism. But we can’t refuse to play the only game in town on principle, we all have bills to play.

In the end, I’m sad and conflicted about the world we live in.