#I've already basicslly sworn off facebook

[forgottendance]

Coronavirus anxieties currently go like this:

1) according to my brain, I am definitely carrying coronavirus with no symptoms and going to make everyone around me sick. This is a general anxiety I have a lot, as a fairly healthy person who has a hard time taking breaks, but also doesn't want to make people sick, and the panic and individualism and judgement around me is just making it worse.

2) change in routine causes anxiety, uncertainty causes anxiety, unclear information causes anxiety, literally everything about this causes anxiety. Work created an action plan that says we don't have to use PTO to stay home if we have symptoms, but it doesn't say if we get paid. And it says we have to work from home if we are able, and it has no information about what that looks like when my job is answering the office phone and organizing things physically in the office. Things are getting constantly cancelled and rescheduled or just...everything is wreaking havoc with my schedule. And, like, it feels whiny to be like "woe is me, my schedule is disrupted while people are sick", but this is something that affects my day to day functioning. My routine and patterns and plans are already fucked and it's only going to get worse and that means I'm not going to manage well.

3) hyperempathy sucks. It requires major major boundaries. It's impossible to have that boundary when the thing causing anxiety is the only topic of conversation these days. Half of my time at work is hunting the internet for purell. Then everyone panics at me because we don't have enough purell. Then someone gifts me face masks. Then someone tells me about the lack of wipes in the Uber they just took. Then I leave work and go to lunch and the servers are scared and people are wearing face masks and I overhear someone talking about coronavirus preparations in their workplace. The only way to avoid absorbing anxiety would be to lock myself in the room and never look at social media and talk to anyone.

4) individualism is terrifying. The fact that our world has gotten this focused on the self is terrifying. My coworker was proud of himself for not holding an elevator for someone today because "social distancing" and I am horrified. When our response to disaster is to look out for only ourselves, when we can't even extend small kindnesses to each other, how the fuck are we going to actually get through the disaster? And, again, this isn't a new thing. People have been dying because of this for a while. It just makes me so angry that it took this to get people to care about the spread of disease...and then only about the spread of disease to themselves. It's sickening and gross and I just...can't think about it. If I think too much about how scary and awful our world is under capitalism, I lose the ability to function...and, uh, yeah...it's currently difficult to avoid.

And I mostly just had to write that out somewhere so it would hopefully stop being panicky inside me. And now I am going to go home and go back to getting shit done and working things out and I'm going to be fine, and if I'm lucky, I might even lose my grumpy mood now I've grumbled. Who knows.

#coronavirus #think I'm going to have to blacklist that now #I've already basicslly sworn off facebook #mehhhhhhh #whinewhinewhinewhinewhine