Pausing Optimism: 4 Things I've Learned in 4 Days of Shelter-In-Place
I’ve reached the point where I’m eating croissants in bed at 2 PM, so I thought I’d write out some of my feelings.
1. Per the Ancient Egyptians, we’ll all float on okay.
My grandmother is a renowned egyptologist, and as such has always said that her profession makes it impossible not to believe in fate. According to her and the people she has studied for over 60 years, there is no such thing as free will. We are subject to the whims and fancies of the universe, and the only thing we can do is learn to run alongside the chaos. That mentality has been passed down for thousands of generations, and carried our people through colonialism, coups, and revolutions. In terms of our mental health, we tend towards depression (a nonchalant acceptance that things are bad but could be worse) over anxiety (a frustration towards our thwarted efforts to control what cannot be controlled). We are surrounded in desert, and buried in history. The Mediterranean region is infamous for its lack of timeliness–but in the case of the Egyptian people, we’ve been around for so long that our utter disregard for constructs of the time-space continuum is understandable.
However, my particular brand of Egyptian-American hybrid nonsense has developed a culturally uncharacteristic neuroses. I’ve spent a great deal of this quarantine thinking I should have kept “the world might launch into full apocalypse mode at any second and I need to prepare accordingly” in my mental notes. Remember all those times in America and Egypt when we didn’t have a government? You could probably have predicted this, I tell myself. What strange lack of foresight you have, Mariam, given how much time you spend on the internet. To reel my blossoming insanity back in approximately three to four notches, I have found that I am faced with three choices:
Masquerade as an ancient Egyptian. To do this, I will promenade the Panhandle with a towel around my waist and several snakes for extraneous godly decor. I will shave my head and insist that my roommates occasionally carry me. Cats will somehow be involved. Stay tuned.
Give up ever being on time, ever again. If we’ve learned anything from this quarantine, it’s that deadlines are fake news anyways.
Stay inside, and stop fighting.
2. People really need people, even if they don’t want to admit it.
I don’t have a lengthy story for this. The ancient Egyptians, like the modern Egyptians, were social people. But I forget that human beings need each other sometimes in Silicon Valley, where I’m an extrovert in a sea of seemingly-ingenious introverts. I frequently feel overwhelmed by how determinedly alone my community can tend to be, how frowned upon it is to ask for help. My friends in the engineering sector have often told me that my goal in life should be to be an island, alone. But islands tend to gather in clusters, and now we’re all withering and upset, so that was a garbage metaphor and there’s no point in extending it for another handful of sentences.
Isolation is hard, and I have a possibly false hope that if and when we come out of this, we’ll know better than to mistake loneliness for strength.
3. My mental health is enormously dependent on the idea that things can and do change in a moment.
It often feels like the moment I started having to pay my own rent, my life became timed in month-to-month increments. And with the regular stripping away of my paycheck, I came to use the month-mark as a comparative stamp. What was I doing thirty days ago (sipping beer in the park with the dog), in juxtaposition to what I’m doing now (suppressing mild panic at the thought that I may never get to sip beer in the park with the dog again)? It literally took paying the rent, folks, but I finally get it when people say that everything can change in an instant.
This idea that at a moment’s notice life can take you away on its next great adventure –a professional opportunity, a trip, a friendship, a relationship, or even the slightest new realization–has kept me running from moment to moment. I’ve loved my life because, until this virus, I existed with the full confidence of its growth potential, and wholeheartedly believed in the impermanence of all things. It’s a grotesquely Silicon Valley system of optimism. Shelter-in-place–even from my extremely privileged place–has meant pausing that mindset indefinitely. It has meant having to pause my optimism.
4. Life isn’t actually a book, and you can’t read the ending to make sure everything is going to be ok.
The weird thing about life, I’ve learned in the last few weeks, is that you can’t really skip to the ending to see what happens, and then go back to where you were, and carry on reading with the full and happy knowledge that all will end well. That’s always been how I read books–which, call it what you will, is actually quite effective. By preparing before I emotionally invest, I can avoid the deep sadness that comes with an unsatisfying ending. As a kid, I’d go to the middle school library, pull out a book that had an interesting title, cover, and genre, read the summary, and then read the ending. If I liked the ending, I’d read the rest of the book.
I’m sure you can see how this has translated into some more problematic adult behaviors. Parents, take heed. Before you tell your children to “read the classics” and chuck a hefty collection of Charles Dickens’ Bests at them, keep this in mind: the heartbreak of a sad ending will lead to a lifetime of avoidance tactics.
Anyways, I’m telling you this story because I’ve been told I’m still young, and there’s no end to my metaphorical book in sight. It is literally nowhere to be found. You can’t even skip a chapter in this godforsaken series. And now, the author has decided to throw in a pandemic. Who knows what’s going to happen? Who knows why it’ll happen? In the midst of all this panic, the only thing we can really do is hold onto our hats.
We may be out of this soon. Or we may not. But we’ll have learned a lot, and at the very least, we’ll be able to resume our regularly scheduled optimism.