In these trying times of stress and uncertainty, it is easy to focus on all the things we have lost: the routines, activities, distractions etc.. Marinating in news, it seems impossible to feel anything but disheartened and overwhelmed by the sheer volume of both known and unknown.

A virus does not merely enter into one’s body as a drop of vinegar enters into a pool of oil. A virus as serious as COVID-19 does not merely spread throughout the body, but consumes the whole of a person. Like salt on an icy sidewalk, these small independent virus particles change the very properties of our bodies, the essence of our sense of self and the form we take in the physical world.

Who am I if I am not my body, my embodied self at my full potential? Who am I if my tangible form cannot support my efforts to contribute to my work, connect with others, or interact with a greater part of the world than the six by four parameters of my bed? A virus humbles at the most fundamental level, causing one to recognize the fragility of their body, and by extension, recognize how reliant we have grown on the vessel as defining of the liquid inside.

It is foolish to try and feel anything but defeated by this virus, right? To minimize the immeasurable amount of suffering, struggle, and death for millions of individuals would be heretically irresponsible. Is it not within the realm of our responsibility to give this illness and its victims the attention, empathy, and anxiety that they deserve?

The strange part about this new situation, this quarantine, is how much it has infected even those of us who have not yet come into contact with it. Again, I do not wish to minimize the suffering of those who have fallen ill or had members of their family fall ill, but merely wish to also bring to focus the impact this virus has had on all of us, infected or not in the hopes that the recognition of that struggle can alleviate some of the feelings of shame and isolation that stem an almost instinctive sense to invalidate one’s own experience upon comparison to the struggles of others. It’s easy to troll healthy celebrities on Instagram, crying in their 20 million dollar mansions. It’s much harder to hold space for the possibility of their very real struggle too.

While I am lucky enough to not be stricken with symptoms of the virus thus far, I do still feel sick. I feel sick with angst, I feel sick with worry, and I feel sick with helplessness. While my physical body still feels healthy, I have been humbled by my ability to control the status of my body — where I can go and what I can do, the fact that I can’t seem to be able to stop my hands from touching my face, or stop myself from wanting a drink far before the end of each day. I have been humbled by my inability to control the status of my life –the sense of security and comfort I got from feeling safe in a job, in a routine, in a community.

Even those of us who are not sick are still living so many aspects of the sick experience: confined to a physical space, unable to participate in so many of the regular activities that help us define who we are, unable to reach out and hug the two dimensional avatars of those we care about through a screen, unsure of how to be “ourselves” without the ability to engage with the world in the way we wish.

While it feels silly to say that working at the public library, a Thursday night yoga class, or sunday night family dinners defined “me”, without so many of these traditional outlets, it has been more difficult to feel and experience the choices that make me who I am. I am the type of person that chooses to bike to work, that gets my morning coffee at Dunkin, that likes to lift weights two or three times a week. While none of these actions are technically impossible anymore, it has been difficult to readjust my sense of self in the face of reduced or altogether different optionality. I suddenly am second guessing every action that used to be so seamless and easy — am I allowed to go outside for runs? Should I still be going to work at the mental health clinic? Is it bad to go eat dinner at my girlfriends’ parents house? It’s cognitively exhausting.

Cognitive load model

Ultimately, I hope that I am being melodramatic. I hope that I look back and read this in several weeks and laugh pitifully at myself for feeling overwhelmed in the face of such small turbulence. Of course there are still opportunities to make choices and carry the through lines from life before COVID-19 to this quarantined life. I am weeping over a lost sense of self as though it were permanent, and yet how old is the routine that I found myself in a week ago, really? Was it this static structure that expanded back to time indefinite, or was it growing and fluctuating just like everything else?

What was I doing six months ago, twelve months ago, three years ago? Did my sense of self become completely redefined with my graduation from college, my move to the jungles of Costa Rica, my return back to an urban US environment? Sure, my routines changed, my outlets needed to be adjusted. But none of these was a true loss of self, just a change in the vessel in which myself was contained.

And these choices, these questions that now appear in my mind at every stage of my day, while exhausting, also provide an opportunity to bring intentionality to my routine. To re-examine that which I care about and be carrying that awareness through my days in a way that was so difficult before when there weren’t such obvious external stakes.

I am ultimately still myself and I still care about the things that I care about. What remains is not only to find new, creative outlets for the things that gave me a comfortable sense of identity before the quarantine, but also to look and see what things have been missing in my life that this new, unique context allows for?

I have more time to call and connect with my family. I am more in touch with the fear and real possibility of loss that drives me towards gratitude and appreciation of the health and safety of those I care about. The lack of external stimuli affords me a unique opportunity to look within and engage with the spiritual sides of myself that are so easy to push aside with easy physical distractions. I am more appreciative and invested in my job, given the recognition of the fragility of our financial system. I have an opportunity to explore different types of fitness and outlets for physical activity. I certainly wouldn’t be writing right now if the triumvirate of COVD-19, frustration and boredom, had not coerced me to do so.

Maimonides (1138–1204)

The 12th century Jewish philosopher Maimonides described his theory on the purpose of the suffering brought by sickness in the world as an opportunity to demonstrate one’s power to change and grow. Oftentimes it takes suffering on a physical level, a 104 degree fever or several days of throwing up, to motivate us to change — to be more careful about what we’re eating, to be able to swallow bitter tasting medicine, to be more thoughtful about our energy expenditures. Maimonides said that this experience can show us our ability to make change, when needed, not only on a physical level, but on a spiritual level as well. When are backs are against the wall, we can examine and change the autopilot functions that have so long felt outside of our control. It is the role of sickness to demonstrate to us that our willpower is stronger than we think, that we have abilities beyond our perceptions, with the hope that we can learn to call on these reserves of strength even in times when the crisis is not so proximate.

I hope that during this crisis, whatever types of illness we are suffering, we can internalize this lesson. The negative aspects of this pandemic, the sickness, the job loss, the death, are beyond our control as individuals. No matter how hard I quarantine myself, they are going to happen. It is the inevitability of this virus, for me, that is one of its most disheartening aspects. It would be foolish to ignore the negative implications on the world at large, especially when they are so tangible and real. And yet, I believe that it would also be foolish to a priori dismiss that there are possibilities for positives, and irresponsible not to search for them.

While the wildfire of negative impacts seem destined to continue burning down the forest despite our personal best efforts, the positive seeds of possibility within the blaze require much more intention and choice from each of us as indviduals to bloom from mere potential. We each have a responsibility to the community to do what we can to stop the spread of this disease: to quarantine, to wear a mask, to social distance. But we also have a responsibility to ourselves to accept the limitations of our individual control over a global outcome, and instead do what we can to search for and nurture those seeds of possibility within ourselves that only exist in times of chaos and disorder, the lessons that only sickness can teach.

How can one compare the growth of a single flower to the destruction of a whole forest, the fragility of a single stem grown over the course of several days to the strength and resilience of oaks thousands of years in the making? I can’t. And yet I still know that I prefer the golden sway of a single fire poppy to the scorched char of endless ash.