Category Archives: Covid Times

One Year Out

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A year ago, my psychotherapy practice safely operating through a screen, I gave away my office furniture and turned in my keys. I felt lucky about my month-to-month lease but wondered if I was making a mistake. Might things get back to normal with summer here? Premature reopening and optimism soon gave way to an escalating spike in cases and deaths, making it clear that Covid disruption was going to be profound and long-lasting.

As always, I asked my clients how they were doing. After long consideration, one replied, “I’m okay,” before adding, “When things are really okay, that’s when I’ll freak out.”

My client’s remark captures the coping through numbness that has typified the last year and a half. We’ve all experienced the Groundhog Day sensation of being trapped in the same day over and over again. Cut off from our normal lives, we’ve also had to cut off our feelings to survive.

For a long time in therapy, Covid crowded out everything else. Sessions felt like highly repetitive check-ins, with reminders to breathe and practice self-compassion. A close therapist friend and I marveled that people were willing to pay us for this. Feeling helpless and shell-shocked ourselves, we lost sight of the value of simply being there.

Gradually, there was room for deeper exploration. My clients still talked a lot about Covid, but they also talked about the 2020 elections, George Floyd’s murder, and, of course, the issues that brought them to therapy in the first place. Despite not meeting in person, it began to feel like therapy again.

Unsurprisingly, each person’s pandemic experience was filtered through psyche and circumstance. For one client who lives in constant terror at the best of times, leaving the house even while triply masked felt like stepping into a fusillade of invisible Covid bullets. Family dynamics were illuminated through heartbreaking rifts over the virus. People—including me–had to confront their often intense feelings of hostility and judgment toward unmasked people they passed on the street. There was plenty of resilience, but also a quiet unraveling.

In the midst of exhaustion and angst, something else emerged over the last year and a half: greater self-knowledge, clearer boundaries and priorities, a sense of wanting to retain some of what Covid necessitated. So many of my clients have expressed gratitude for life becoming simpler, for not having to engage with activities or people they don’t particularly like, for discovering what’s truly important to them.

With vaccines bringing relief and freedom, we are beginning to feel what we have needed to keep at bay: grief, loss, and anger, but also hope and gratitude. There’s a profound savoring of the little things we used to take for granted.

Yet reopening is also triggering the jitters. How are we to interpret a masked or maskless face? Will letting down our guard lead to a disastrous spike? Must we don social artifice, return to functions and relationships we haven’t missed, invest in elaborate ventilation and contact tracing plans for our offices? What happens now?

Perhaps my client’s prediction is coming true as our numbness begins to thaw: Now that things are better, it’s safe enough to freak out.

First Day of Spring

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Yes, I know that officially yesterday was the first day of spring, but in my book, the cusp doesn’t count. The real deal is March 21st, embedded in my brain and on my calendars since childhood. That childhood was spent in New England, where usually a blanket of snow lay unperturbed by the date on the page. I’ve lived in the San Francisco Bay Area since 1977, where daffodils burst forth and the Japanese plums are festooned with a cloud of pink blossoms just in time for Valentine’s Day. But the calendar defies lived experience. March 21 is the first day of spring, and that’s that.

March 21, 2020, is also the wedding date of a couple unknown to me to whom I am eternally grateful. Without their long-planned nuptials, my daughter and her boyfriend would have moved from San Francisco to Brooklyn on the first of March. But they delayed their departure to witness a cousin’s joy.

That short time span, of course, was when our world turned upside down. I think of my daughter and her boyfriend trying to find an apartment and navigating the subways, newly arrived in the pandemic’s epicenter. Instead, they scrambled to see if they could rescind the notice they’d given on their nearly packed apartment. (Yes, they could!) They started working remotely for the same tech companies whose New York branches had beckoned. They kept abreast of the cousin’s rapidly shrinking wedding plans and slept unperturbed by constant sirens.

My husband and I drew huge sighs of relief. They were safe, at least for now. Not the fate, sadly, of so many. We felt the shock and sorrow of the deepening horror along with our luck.

We also felt lucky that it was spring when shelter-in-place began. The green hills, blossoms, and soft breezes would see us through until things got better—around July, I figured in those early days. Surely by then universal masking, testing, contact tracing, and cooperation would have contained the virus.

Instead, things got worse, catastrophically so for tens of millions in this country alone. Groundhog Day, the 13th month of March, our long, dark winter, the apocalypse—whatever we called this strange time warp of everything different while also the same, it seemed like it would last forever.

Then the vaccines came. It felt like deliverance, even though we were cautioned that not much could change.

Here’s what changed immediately, though. Despite some lousy side effects those two jabs can cause, the most pronounced and immediate are the rush of joy and hope. Whereas last spring marked our entrance to Hell, this spring feels like we may truly soon emerge if we don’t abandon our senses.

To celebrate (fully masked and vaccinated), my friend Mary and I met at Filoli, a gorgeous estate south of San Francisco known for its gardens.

We’ve visited many times over the years, but savored this time especially. Not just for nature’s splendor, but for the extraordinary appreciation of all the ordinary things like seeing a friend in person and not over Zoom, making plans, envisioning a good future. (Still, nature was pretty splendid):

    As for the couple who saved my daughter and her boyfriend from moving to a Covid hotspot? Today marks their first anniversary (the ceremony occurred as scheduled, though with a tiny group of masked intimates, our two not among them). Happy anniversary—and congratulations on the birth of your baby earlier this month!

    Spring is indeed here again—a time of hope and renewal.

    Our National Holiday

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    Groundhog

    Finally, the day you’ve been living over and over again for almost a year is officially here! I’m referring, of course, to Groundhog Day, hitherto an obscure and underrated holiday whose elevation I’ve proposed as an apt celebration of the American character.

    But I didn’t quite intend this level of elevation, this much capturing of our experience! Seriously, I could do without Groundhog Day as a national meme baked into our collective unconscious because of COVID Times. Like Bill Murray in the famous film, the alarm goes off and we are eternally trapped in the same day. Also with the same people, same four walls, same conversations, same Zoom screens, same Netflix stupor, same quiet unraveling. And that’s if we’re lucky!

    The tedium is broken up by panic attacks about paying the bills, homeschooling the kids, elderly parents dying alone, sniffles spelling death–you name it. Not to mention anxiety about armed anti-maskers storming state capitols and militant anti-reality mobs staging an insurrection at our nation’s Capitol under the direction of Donald Trump. So much for subscribing to the “What’s the downside to humoring him?” theory.

    This got me thinking about whether groundhogs are harmless hibernators who sometimes bite people who haul them out of their slumber, or if there’s a darker side to these reluctant rodent celebrities. As one gardening website asks, “Can that cute groundhog really cause damage?”

    Yes, as it turns out. Much like insurrectionists and their leaders, “If not properly controlled, groundhogs can cause serious structural damage when burrowing. Their tunnels break apart building foundations . . . ” An easy Google ramble further reveals the answers to some of the most vexing questions, including my favorite: “Are groundhogs good for anything?” This is artfully evaded with a sort of “All God’s Creatures” vibe, plus a passing note that they’re vegetarians.

    More pragmatically, we learn how to get rid of a groundhog:

    –Sprinkle blood meal, ground black pepper, dried blood, or talcum powder around the perimeter of your garden.

    –Puree and strain hot peppers and garlic, mix them with water and enough liquid soap to make it stick, and spray it liberally around the garden.

    Would that these methods worked with insurrectionists and conspiracy theorists!

    Anyway, today’s news is that the groundhog foretells 6 more weeks of winter. Had it been cloudy, it would have been slightly shorter. Since the daffodils are currently blooming where I live, and since the calendar notes that Spring will be here no matter what in about six weeks, I smell a hoax. Or some kind of rodent.

    At any rate, we did wake to a slightly new day on January 20. President Biden has a plan to bring us out of our long, dark winter. No groundhog can tell how long it will take to emerge from Covid Times based on the presence or absence of its shadow. Assuming vaccination rates continue to improve, here’s a better predictor of how many more deaths will occur depending on how we (and Congress) all act in the meantime.

    As Bill Murray learned in Groundhog Day, he had choices within his trap, choices that led to remaining stuck or breaking free. So do we.

    Hallelujah

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    On the same day our country marked the milestone of more than 400,000 people dead from COVID, we were finally able to collectively acknowledge and grieve our loss. President-Elect Biden reminded us, “To heal we must remember. . . . It is important we do that as a nation. That’s why we are here today.”

    In the brief space between sundown and dusk, the simple and somber pre-inauguration memorial was electrifying. Lori Marie Key, a Detroit nurse, sang “Amazing Grace”—the same as she did on her shifts tending COVID patients to lift spirits amid all the heartbreak. Gospel singer Yolanda Adams then sang Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” Along the entire length of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, 400 light pillars—each representing 1,000 lives lost—began to glow as darkness descended. The camera slowly zoomed out to reveal the illuminated waterway, Abraham Lincoln frozen in marble and time, the Potomac beyond.

    “In Hebrew, the word hallelujah means to rejoice in praising God,” I soon learned from Kyson Parks’s The Origin and History of the Song “Hallelujah,” by Leonard Cohen. Parks continues:

    It is a bitter lament about love and loss . . . “Hallelujah,” the song teaches us, is a refrain worthy of times of celebration, of mourning, of regret, of catharsis, and reconciliation. Cohen’s song tells a story of broken love, true love remembered and mourned, guilt, penance, and of finding peace in the vicissitudes of brokenness.

    How fitting for what we have been through. In our nation’s capital, the last line of the song—“It’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah” soared over the Reflecting Pool as the lights came up.

    For some of us, Leonard Cohen’s song marked the beginning as well as the end of Trump’s  presidency. On the first Saturday Night Live after the 2016 election, Kate McKinnon–who had played Hillary Clinton throughout SNL’s 2016 campaign skits–performed it for SNL’s Cold Open.

    When McKinnon finished, she turned to the audience as Hillary and said, “I’m not giving up, and neither should you.”

    Tomorrow Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will be sworn in as our new President and Vice President.

    Hallelujah.

    Screen Time

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    I see my client’s face. A bit pixelated, true, but more centrally framed now that the camera angle cutting her off just above the chin last week has been adjusted. I glimpse my own image and “office” in the small rectangle. Oh, no, has the covering slipped from my daughter’s old dresser? How many times will the screen freeze today?

    Still, it’s better than nothing. I’m lucky to have a private space, with no children to homeschool or shush—the daughter whose room I’m in is long grown. Cursed, blessed technology exists now, at least for most people with the wherewithal to find their way into somebody’s private practice. I have been on Zoom support sessions for clinicians, and hear horror stories from those who work with people who are impoverished, undocumented, hungry, homeless, imprisoned, sick, overwhelmed by life even in the best of times. Some people they’ve been unable to reach altogether.

    The fact that things are so much worse for others is frequently brought up by my clients who can and want to keep seeing me. They feel grateful and guilty. I feel the same way.

    Still, we sit and talk. I talked too much at first, trying to compensate for the feeling of disconnection through excess verbiage. Eventually I remembered the value of listening, with an assist from Zoom, which goes haywire when more than one person (or rectangle) is speaking.

    Nothing sounds quite right. I read somewhere that the time lag is part of what makes video calls so tiring. Exhaustion turns to panic when suddenly the client’s voice sounds stretched out and underwater, or every other word is dropped. What if they are revealing something crucial, and I miss it? I briefly wonder if bandwidth, too, engages in repression or dissociation, or if it reflects the client’s usual experience of feeling unheard and my own inattentiveness.

    Sometimes, I prefer just the phone. I came into the mental health field more than 40 years ago as a crisis line volunteer, and like a duckling, I imprinted on the first thing I was exposed to. I’ve always been struck by how people can often go deeper, be more vulnerable on the phone.

    Still, whether via Zoom, doxy, FaceTime, or phone, psychotherapy in the time of Covid has felt a lot like those many check-in calls I fielded on the crisis line. People say the same thing, over and over. It’s the same conversation we’re all having now, as coronavirus infects not only our cells and the economy but every nook and cranny of mental space. My colleague asked two analytically inclined clients if they wished to explore some of what they were delving into before. “Absolutely not!” they both said. I’ve wondered with clients what we might be talking about if we weren’t talking about the pandemic. “That’s a good question!” they say, before returning to coronavirus. Remote video platforms aren’t the only ones with bandwidth issues.

    Time feels so strange, endless and fleeting at once. Clients wonder, How long will this last? When can we return? And even if we do, will I ever feel safe? Wondering the same, we do our best to hold people, not knowing how long we can all hold on.

    Time Warp

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    I am almost always way behind in my reading: usual backlogs are six weeks for the New Yorker and six months for the Atlantic. My husband once remarked, “You have many good qualities, but knowing when to stop reading an article you’re not absorbing isn’t one of them.” (Neither is speed reading.)

    Taking his words to heart, at least now when I sit down with The New York Review, I flip through the pages, reading only one or two articles between the cover and the Complex, Dynamic Tomboy and New York City Attorney seeking love (or at least lust) in the back-page Personals.

    “Damn,” I think to myself as I toss the barely read periodical into the recycling bin. “This is really great and incisive writing. Too bad I don’t do more of it.”

    I can’t toss The New Yorker, though. I’ve never been a just-the-cartoons page-flipper. The magazine used to be known for its timeless (and endless), multi-part series on things like corn, or rivers, or geology, so it didn’t really matter when I tackled my piles. But even the hallowed New Yorker succumbed to the reality of shorter attention spans and more topical coverage. So I’m now often in a time warp when I do sit down to read.

    After the 2016 election, I savored this peculiarity. For weeks, I was still relishing the prospect of our first female commander-in-chief. President Obama was not ever going to have to turn over the keys and the nuclear codes to someone completely his opposite and unfit for office in every way imaginable. I could live in my alternative reality long before the Trump administration’s insistence on doing so wreaked such widespread havoc.

    Now I’m in that surreal space again, my reading lagging way behind the current reality of our Covid-upended world. In my time warp, things exist beyond the total takeover not only of our health and our economy, but of seemingly all news, conversation, and every waking and non-waking moment.

    My lagging world isn’t quite as enjoyable as before, when President Obama’s magnetic smile stretched from sea to shining sea. I’m catching up on the House impeachment vote, moving through Ian Frazier’s Season’s Greetings, the assassination of Qassem Suleimani, the Democrats in disarray. Mitt Romney hasn’t yet become an unlikely hero/traitor (take your pick) during the Senate impeachment “trial.” The Iowa caucuses are still a quaint if undemocratic trendsetting tradition, not a debacle. There’s still more than a dozen candidates vying for the Democratic nomination. Then, as I make my way through the stacks, Bernie is poised to run all the way to the end zone while his opponents tackle each other, littering the field. Super Tuesday has yet to come, along with all the rest of the brutal primaries before they get postponed. The Democrats are not yet in a state of array behind Joe Biden–Man from a By-gone Era who is, strangely, now the Man of the Moment. There’s nary a hint of the pandemic about to engulf us (although one might take this flu season Valentine as foreshadowing):

    I am glad my behind-the-times reading creates corners of my psyche beyond the reach of Covid. I am even perversely grateful to be reminded of how Stephen Miller is one of the most loathsome denizens of Trump’s swamp. The corona virus is not the only devastating force in the world.

    My time warp is about to converge with the present moment: I have finished the New Yorker whose cover features Trump with a surgical mask over his eyes as he rages on and on. Just two more issues until the one with the spiky virus balls festooning the cover. I will miss the past times of my so-slow reading, just as I miss our pre-Covid world that seems centuries ago.

    But I look forward to a better future, when and if it ever comes.