Disease
The pandemic made me sick, but not only in the way you might expect.
I will not go into the details as I’ve gone over them so many times. Years later, I am still not fully well and will suffer recurrences of related health issues. While I have recovered in many ways, there will always be a lingering fear that something has been damaged or broken in a way that is entirely undetected. The experience was sudden, and while I had been having a rather safe and quiet pandemic, this rocked my world. I had not really suffered from panic attacks in my life before this, but they became something quite regular for me during this period. I’ll likely never know, but I am led to believe that they were highly physiological in nature and not simply driven by mental states. The experience brought death into sharp relief for me, and there were a number of nights I would fall asleep wondering if I would wake up. At one point, I even wrote a crude note to my family were they to find me dead the next day, just in case. This was a trying time for me. While I had dealt with thoughts of death before, this was the point in my life where it became real to me. One small positive aspect of this time was a growth in empathy, both towards others and myself. I spent a great deal of time in contact with support groups, trying to aid others who suffered in the dark as I had. On the whole, this period was a form of growing up I suppose; it dissolved much of the veneer that coated my childhood frameworks.