If no one is talking about pandemic fatigue anymore, I will.
Because if left unspoken it will take me down.
It is the first Monday of 2022 and there’s not enough coffee brewing in the entire world to keep me awake.
It feels like 2020 all over again, except instead of being able to look at the situation with a set of fresh eyes like I could the first time, I’m wandering through it, very confused, with two years of trauma on my back.
My house is quiet for the first time since before Christmas, but my mind is loud.
It screams at me to read more news, to be afraid, and to hone in on that the small, barely detectable, possible figment of my imagination scratch in my throat.
But the loudest, shreikiest scream is the one that yells at me, saying “how the hell could you send your kids to school this week?”
After everyone has been at holiday gatherings during the surge of the most transmissible variant to date, it feels like sending them into the lion’s den while I get to work safely from home.
It feels really bad.
There’s no other way to describe it.
But the system seems set up against me, in many ways, to make an impossible choice.
Yes, I know, they will “probably be OK”, but when we say that, we’re really saying is that our kids will “probably not die”. And I don’t think my mind will ever be OK with that reality.