5/15/2020
It’s now May 15, 2020 and I feel the urge to bookend this personal Corona Diary chapter of blog posts and move on to more work-related issues. I admit I’ve not touched on issues that are important. Like the startling range of symptoms, the global race for a vaccine or Covid-19 therapies, the idiocy of defunding the WHO, or defaming the most compelling voice of scientific reason. There’s so much to learn. So many unanswered questions; it’s overwhelming. My reactions, at least the ones I wrote about were things that touched me personally while I was sick. But there’s too much. So why put these personal observations and experiences out on my business website?
I wanted you to gain an “insider’s view” of what it was like to go through a scary but ultimately mild infection that is like what most people would experience, assuming they’re as lucky as me. To be scared, to be depressed and to fight and ultimately overcome these feelings as you recover from with the sickness.
Normally when you get sick, it’s a private affair. You call in or go home, pull the covers over your head and emerge a couple days or weeks later, thinner, raggedy but ready to work. This novel pandemic has blown the hinges off all the bedroom and ICU doors and made its historical course a matter of global concern and anxiety.
The other thing it’s done is brought out all the people who love me. Who nurtured me with hand sanitizer, mushroom soup and German Chocolate cupcakes, phone calls and Zoom calls. There was a point when I couldn’t talk for more than five minutes without wanting to curl in a fetal ball, but as I recovered, I felt joy and energy in ways I’d never before imagined. I can’t look back on the intensity of that outpouring without getting emotional.
We have all sacrificed. Lives, personal space, peace of mind. But we are still us, though not the same as before. March and April have been a wakeup call. It’s now May and I have to wonder if we’re woke yet.
Writing when you have skin in the game
I do want clients and potential clients to see that it is possible and NECESSARY to experience and write about issues of global health with accuracy, but directness and empathy, in ways that ordinary people can relate to. In the beginning, I had lots of notes, Facebook rants and the digital equivalent of legal pads filled with scrawl. I suffered through acute flashes of despair and many inarticulate moments of anger and I wanted them, needed them to be articulate moments of anger. Or else what’s the point?
I worry so much about what’s to come. According to NPR, social distancing has been steadily breaking down since mid-April. It will be in shambles by the end of this month, far too early by the reports of all the experts. Far too late for a fall economic recovery. We are a such a flighty, impatient, unscientific, amnesiac people. The bug will bounce back, perhaps harder this time and many people will die. It makes me sad because it’s preventable to a large degree. We only have to change all our priorities.
I think we’re more compelled than ever to take on the long view. 20, 30, 100 years from now we’ll look back and point to 2020—as the moment everything changed. How are we going to hug and be close to each other? Have weddings, funerals, picnics, intimacy?
It’s not nice to fool with M. Nature.
Just as fundamentally, though we love nature, this year we discovered that nature doesn’t particularly love us. This is the year we learned we need PPE to step outside into our “natural habitat.” Some of us suspect nature may be looking for ways to limit our destructive influence. To off us. And you couldn’t ask for a better mechanism than a virus. Small, easily mass-produced, eminently adaptable and given our slowness to learn and prepare, incredibly effective.
What nature preserves, I think, she creates in abundance to the point of waste. The six billion of us are barely a blip in comparison to the insects in the meadows, the (virus-spreading) birds in the air, the nuts and pods that fall from the trees.
I am a fully recovered corona cowboy, body surging with zippy antibodies with an indeterminate expiration date. If anybody is okay running around out there without a mask, it should be me.
But I’m still wearing one. Running on hope and urgency, praying we’re on a downward slope and not a fat tail or worse …
True, warm, sunny spring, much delayed through the end of April, was a promise delayed into the ides of May. Does this monster have a season? We’ll soon know.
Okay, big all business close. Any of you looking to shoot an “explainer” or documentary on COVID-19 and need a scriptwriter or content consultant, I think I have a pretty novel take on it. I’m your man. Call me or shoot me a response.
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