Object Permanence

My boss ordered me to schedule time off, and to put a walk outside during daylight hours on my calendar. It's been working; I've gotten out, and though focus is still like trying to contain and recollect a bucket of bouncy balls, my mood has softened a little and I *feel* better generally.

I've been walking from my apartment at 20th and Judah down to Sunset and back each day. If I have time, I'm sometimes going to Andytown, the last coffee shop open around here, for a slice of something like normality. They're a few blocks from the ocean. Tomorrow I think I'm going to go all the way down to the beach, find a sand dune to sit on, and just not be here for a bit.

While I walk, I listen to music. Not because I want to, but because it makes the brain weasels shut up for a bit. I realized, and this is perhaps a sign of something neurodivergent about me, that for the most part I've lived my life in silence since May of 2017. It's honestly not great for me. Most people turn on music or the radio or something, but I realized I don't feel the need to do that because there is always a snippet of something or other running on an endless loop in my head. I'm not sure what exactly changed. The breakup was traumatic, but... was it so bad as to permanently alter my brainmeats? Maybe? Or is this one more thing that points again to "perhaps you should get assessed for ADHD, you nutty hyperfocuser, you."

While I walk, while the brainweasels are drowned out by pop songs, I finally have the chance to think.

It's really strange how fast all of this has become routine. It's also really strange how thick a layer it is, of "feels routine" spread over a fast-moving current of terror-fear-grief. It's amazing how fast we all went from our normal lives to standing in line for flour and eggs, to cooking with what we've got instead of what we want, to staring out the window and doing all of our social interaction mediated by an electronic service. And yet, almost anything will make me cry right now. Not just eyes-watering, like my normal emotionally-close-to-the-surface self, but sobby, streaming face, uncontrollable ugly-cry.

... Okay and there I go again.

On Monday March 16th, when Mayor Breed was making her announcement along with the six other Bay Area county leaders, I was in a grocery store. It was a remarkably quiet, but tense store, and as word got out that we were about to go into lockdown, people started *jogging*. I realized, standing in line, not knowing what was happening or what would happen, that I was shaking, and my chest felt tight. 80% of the way into a panic attack in a grocery store, but I also realized that if I lost it and started crying, it might crystalize the situation and make things considerably *worse*. I waited in line, shaking. I paid for my groceries, got into the car and drove home. And as soon as the garage door closed behind me, I started to sob. It took me a good few minutes to stop, and I've long since realized that when I start doing this, there's nothing I can do but hang on until my meatsuit is done with it.

I keep thinking back to the Tom Hanks movie, Captain Phillips, and how everyone was amazed at the lifelike depiction of comedown-shock or safety shock. I feel like this is what I'm getting, in bits and blots, any time I acknowledge what's going on outside. At 7pm this evening, I heard a bunch of weird sounds outside; when I realized that it's the "applaud for our medical workers" thing I lost it and had to go inside. Fundraisers for the things that I love are making me cry. I donate, and it feels pitifully small and insignificant, never enough, and I'm afraid for them, and I cry.

But walking, in the afternoons, it all drifts away for a time, and I have to thank my bizarrely wired brain for this one bit of peace. I think we're all waiting in a state of trusting object permanence. Object permanence is something we learn around 6 months old, which is that things continue to exist even though we can't see, hear, or otherwise sense them. In the bright sunlight, walking in the chilly April sea breeze, I can forget that these things are in danger, and I can revert to how I've always been: I trust that when this is all over, I can look for them and they'll be back. I can't see them now, or drink their drinks, eat their food, listen to their songs, watch their dances, hear their speeches and performances, feel their care, but I can trust that they haven't gone away forever.

But I don't know if that's true.

The good news is that San Francisco seems to have flattened its curve; our hospitals are seeing huge ramp-ups in covid-19 patients, but we haven't (yet?) gotten to the point where we've got more sick people than capacity for them, and the current modeling seems to predict that... we might not ever get to that point. New York, on the other hand, is loading refrigerator semi trucks with dead bodies. New York is being hit hard, and fast but I wonder if this means they'll see the peak and begin to recover faster? San Francisco's estimated peak date is 24 days from now; I worry that every little thing I love will begin to wither on the vine, sustained only limpingly for a few weeks by our collective charity before succumbing to greedy landlords. People are thinking about the tyranny of landlords right now. I can and still do hope for some sort of centralized edict of rent and mortgage pause and forgiveness.

The centralized response has resembled more of a chaos-monkey script than an actual attempt to be helpful. But in contrast to the grandstanding, showboating, and profiteering of the current federal administration, we're seeing the seeds of a new federation, new cooperations between governing entities. It gives me the tiniest sparkle of hope.

Everyone wants to find something, anything, that they can do. We've got hundreds of people making masks, every university and makerspace is 3d printing ventilator parts and making homebrew DIY PPE, anyone with contacts in China is desperately trying to import supplies to distribute to hospitals, people are organizing in the neighborhoods to protect the vulnerable, organizing the feed the front line workers, and just plain ol' organizing (fuck yeah, bring back the unions). There is a real possibility that this crisis will help undo the distancing, disconnection, and suspicion of one's neighbors that social media (and its manipulators) have wrought, even while we're standing 6 feet apart, prevented from hugging or singing together.

And that's an interesting change as well - when everyone is apart, everyone is together in being apart. I've attended a bunch of digital events with friends I never get to see; geobreakfast, classes with my favorite yoga teacher who I haven't seen since 2014, impromptu jazz concerts from musicians I'd never heard of until now, livestreaming zoo animals, plays, concerts and productions that I'd otherwise never get to see in person.

I have to believe, for now. There's no use and no sense in breaking down until after the damage is done and we're safe again; only then can we take our grief and rage and turn it into something productive.

Fear

They say that we're living in historic times, and we should journal.

Well, okay. It's been literally a decade since I fell so hard into work that I forgot to write, and I forget how much it feeds my soul. But this has been hard, so hard, and it's not making it any easier to write about.

Let's start with anxiety mixed with survivor's guilt: I still have a job, I can still pay rent, I still have healthcare and groceries and I can pay bills and my home is pleasant and lovely.  I do not appear to have contracted the virus in the many pre-order activities we did.

We're now approaching a full month of shelter in place, and while I find that I'm starting to finally hit my stride in taking the time I need away from work, I'm also finding that the fear and waiting is ramping up, not down. The list of things I want to keep alive and somehow preserve keeps growing. The number of places and services, events and providers who I want to support is growing longer and this doesn't appear to be stopping any time soon. I am afraid that so much of what I loved in the last few years will be gone when we all are able to poke our heads out of hiding. I am so scared, and so overwrought, almost anything will make me cry and I *cannot* seem to stop.

And I'm not even on the front lines. I can't even imagine what's going on for my friends who are healthcare workers, delivery drivers, other essential services. I feel helpless and useless and terrified, and I see all the dreams and plans I had, that others had, foundations cracking in slow motion as the rentier class demands its pound of flesh, crumbling a little more to dust each week. What the opera, theaters, the little independent movie house that serves truffle popcorn, of our favorite Indian places, the all-beef ramen shop, our favorite coffee shops, the tiki bars we've come to view as home? What of the sweet lady who cleans my house, my acupuncturist, chiropractor, the fine arts museum and the science museums and the MOMA, the botanical gardens, the antique fair, the bakery that makes the amazing cinnamon bread, the coffee shop that holds kink events, the tech writer conference, Burning Man? What of the home of our own we'd thought to buy? What if it's all gone when we reemerge?

I am sitting here adrift, despite my own comforts.