I received my first dose of the coronavirus vaccine last week.
The next day, as I cleaned my office desk with a disinfectant wipe, I wondered if I’ll ever feel comfortable just sitting down first thing in the morning.
Glimmers of hope for a return to normalcy are on the horizon. But how normal will we really feel? How normal can we be?
Wiping down my desk is a workplace protocol, but I know it’s not really necessary. No one has been in my office since the custodial staff cleaned the day before. And COVID-19 is highly unlikely to be spread through touch. But we weren’t really sure about that until recently, and my fear of putting my hands on infected surfaces and then touching my face is now ingrained.
Even though I don’t touch my face anymore, and I wear a mask at work.
It’s been a long year.
Dr. Lucy McBride, in an op-ed in The Washington Post, describes a phenomenon she calls “FONO,” the Fear of Normal. We have been traumatized, she writes. Reentry into our old lives may seem scary.
I’ve had to reenter twice now, and it was nerve-racking. I’m a school librarian, and a year ago last week, I learned that my school district would be shut down for two weeks because of the pandemic. That eventually stretched to the rest of the school year.
But staff returned for three days in June. I fretted, even though we would all be masked and socially distanced. The first day, I managed not to use the bathroom. I slathered hand sanitizer constantly.
I finally relaxed a little by the third day.
Then, in August, we were back again. Once again, I had to adapt to being with other people every day. One of my persistent thoughts — which colleagues also expressed — was that after months of following all the rules and staying safe, I could fall ill because I was in a building with more than 100 other people.
And when the students returned on a hybrid model, that would be another 400 souls on any given day. We worried the students wouldn’t keep their masks on. We thought we’d have to go remote after a few weeks.
But the students followed the rules. The custodians kept our school super-clean. Students sat 3 feet apart in the classrooms and 6 feet apart in the lunchrooms.
Multiple locations were required to adhere to the social distancing requirements.
The precautions worked. Transmission within schools has been extremely low. When a school has several cases, it is almost always due to community transmission.
This good news has been a relief, but the traumatic circumstances have remained. It’s hard to be socially distanced all the time, to have to try to carry on conversations through masks. The fear of contagion is ever-present. The phone rings — another case reported. A school in the district shuts down for a week. Multiple students quarantined due to close contact with a sick person.
It took me until March to use the microwave at work, and the contactless water fountain to refill my container. It was parent-teacher conferences night and the building was very quiet, as everyone was in their classrooms meeting virtually. My fears were overwhelmed by my desire for a warm slice of pizza and a full water bottle.
I think this fits in with what McBride calls “practicing normalcy.”
In The Atlantic magazine, Ellen Cushing wrote a piece titled, “Late-Stage Pandemic is Messing with Your Brain.” She says, “But now, in the cold, dark, featureless middle of our pandemic winter, we can neither remember what life was before nor imagine what it will be like after.”
Cushing quotes Tina Franklin, a neuroscientist at Georgia Tech: The pandemic “is exposing people to microdoses of unpredictable stress all the time.” Her research has shown that “stress changes the brain regions that control executive function, learning, and memory.”
Which goes a long way toward explaining the difficulties so many students are having with their schoolwork right now, and why I feel mentally drained about an hour before my workday is due to end. I call it “hitting the wall.”
McBride recommends recognizing that we are experiencing trauma, and then using coping mechanisms to help ameliorate our fears.
Meditation, breathing, and spending time in nature can help.
I walk every day, and have taken to doing jigsaw puzzles on the weekends. I also take time to read — one of my great passions — daily. But I still feel like I’m sleepwalking half the time. The other morning at home, I realized I was counting the steps of my morning routine.
One, give cats dry food. Two, give the girl cats their thyroid medication.
It is seven steps to my own breakfast, which involves three steps: yogurt, berries, granola. Four if I need to fill a glass of water.
Whatever it takes, I guess, to get through this strange reality. At school, I am half back to normal, but there is nothing normal about it. I do fear full reentry, yet I yearn for it. Maybe that’s what I’m really counting my way to — the day when I can smile at my students again — without a mask.
Unafraid.
Liz Soares welcomes email at lizzie621@icloud.com.
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