Getting Over It

 My mother once told me her 70s were her favorite decade as she grew older and I never expected mine to be anything other than an extension of what I felt was late middle age. Then covid came along and slapped me upside the head, giving me a foretaste of how it would be to grow very, very old. 

I was luckier than many. I didn’t lose any of my senses except for my sense of adventure. For thirteen days all I wanted to do was sleep or sit. A trip down the hall to the garbage chute felt like climbing Mount Everest, an exercise in brute physical endurance. Worst of all, for almost two weeks I “lost my invaluable curiosity.”

This phrase comes from a sentence in Tove Jansson’s Fair Play. A man who is 92 tells a woman who has just turned seventy, “Do not tire, never lose interest, never grow indifferent--lose your invaluable curiosity and you let yourself die. It’s as simple as that.”

I first read this around the same time of year that I’m remembering it now,back in 2013, and I recognized its truth immediately. Curiosity and interest have been the underpinning of my life from the time I was very small right up until I took to my bed and my armchair last year. 

I had never before been so thoroughly immobile for such a long time. Even when the fateful T-line refused to show up on my test strip, it took much longer for my physical energy to come back. When it did, it returned in inches. My body had learned the principle of inertia and it was reluctant to launch itself into motion again.

There seems to be a link between physical and mental energy because when my body wanted to remain still, my mind followed that example. “Why bother?” was its response to any idea that occurred to me. All through a glorious summer, “between the motion and the act fell the shadow,” and the shadow was cast by fear.

Except for a fear of swimming and another of wild monkeys, there are few things that have frightened me enough to keep me from doing them. For most of my life if I ever felt apprehensive, that feeling vanished when I confronted it. However the post-covid me became almost paralyzed when compared to my pre-covid self. Inactivity, I thought, might keep me from ever getting the virus again. Instead it steeped me in I hated most about covid: indifference, lack of interest, and torpor.

I’m three months away from my covid anniversary. I still have to force myself to take a walk and when I do, it’s half the length of the ones I took before the end of May in 2022. My mind reflects that abbreviated activity, with writing that barely extends to the length of a decent blog post. I still wear a mask in an unmasked world and even if I could afford a flight to places I yearn to see, I’d have to do a spot of self-hypnosis to make myself sit on a plane for fifteen hours. 

Only recently, as I reread random pieces of writing that I’d done since the beginning of 2020, have I realized that I, as well as the world around me, am recovering from years of trauma that extend beyond the advent of covid. My life has been dominated by uneasiness since the election of Trump. In the beginning of 2017, I was in Shenzhen reading about the ban against Muslim travelers entering the U.S. I read reports of our President’s words in the South China Morning Post and cringed in a mixture of embarrassment and revulsion that would last for four years.

The George Floyd Uprising deepened the dystopian world around all of us, with the police and National Guard attacking protesters with tear gas, flash-bangs, and the LRAD “sound cannons” that induce pain and nausea. By then I was so accustomed to the lock-down form of house arrest that I didn't join the marchers and will always regret that. The storming of the Capitol Building was a horror beyond all imagining. Then came the vaccines that were almost impossible to get--I only received mine because a grandchild drove me to a small town that was hours away. The surreal quality of life has left its scars and because I’ve always been an emotional lightning rod, mine go deep and refuse to go away.

What is prudent? What is madness? How to embrace being alive in the way I always have? Maybe by jettisoning my mask and making myself walk with a sense of adventure again. Maybe by trusting the doses of vaccine that have been pumped into me and kept me from hospitalization a year ago. Maybe by choosing life and once again reclaiming my “invaluable curiosity.”