Pandemic Nation

I started reading Prozac Nation again. I’d read it years ago. Yet, I’d forgotten how desperately wrought and honest the book is about depression and anxiety. She (the late Elizabeth Wurtzel) captured it, and has been criticized for being too “confessional”. Which is bull. Too confessional is another way of saying too hysterical, and too dramatic, or what is otherwise known as being “too female”.

This whole Covid-19 pandemic has and will cause a mental health and addiction crisis that will reverberate for years to come. We are all just coping. Holding on to the life raft of our sanity by our fingernails. Dealing with the unbelievable and the unknowable and basically, trying to handle the biggest shit show ever to happen in our lives.

How are you coping? I want to know. I need help. We all do. I vacillate between working all the time to drinking on the weekend to sleeping to binge watching television. I have no balance. That is out the window friends and it may never come back.

My whole life, I’ve always felt like I was living and walking on a tightrope of sorts. It’s probably why I moved around so much earlier in my life. Lately, I find it hard to move at all. I feel as if I might fall off the tightrope into the abyss below if I take one misstep.

Even trying to cope by writing brings me anxiety. My poetry class I’m taking online stresses me out. It’s not in my lane and I fear criticism.

All of my successes seem trivial now. I want to finish editing my book, which is too close for comfort. I can’t even open the document. It seems like too much.

So my friends, if you’re listening, I hope you can see this is just me. Being me.

I’m going to end on a positive note, as I sit here at 4:29 in the morning, listening to my husband snore. And this is the best I got right now, all I got: This will have to end eventually.

And then we can all go back to living our lives of quiet desperation and hoarding consumer goods and chasing the American Dream that does not exist anymore, a dream that maybe never existed at all.

That’s all I got.