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 |  A journey of self-improvement - or not. |
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Sup? I'm Char. You may know me from timeless classics such as
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[Embed For Use By Upgraded+] Believin' all the lies that they're tellin' ya Buyin' all the products that they're sellin' ya They say jump and ya say "how high?" Ya braindead, ya got a fuckin' bullet in ya head |
Artist: Sufjan Stevens Song: Chicago [Embed For Use By Upgraded+] "30-Day Blogging Challenge ON HIATUS"  Prompt: How has your idea of lockdown/quarantine changed since the beginning of this month?"JAFBG" Prompt: Tell us your worst fears in regards to the current situation and the consequences thereof.I realized today that the same people who said in 2016 that we should vote Trump in "just to see what happens" are the same people who are now saying that we should lift Covid-19 restrictions "just to see what happens." Where did all these kamikazes come from?? We don't have to try out everything just to see what happens. We have these things called science and statistical modeling that help us determine what will happen in a given scenario before we choose that scenario. And then we can actually use those findings to make informed decisions. That’s just a random thought that came to me today and I thought it was appropo for this prompt. Quarantine begins. I’ve actually been in lockdown longer than the average person in the US probably. I’m sitting at 7 weeks right now of only going to the grocery store 3 times a month. Nothing else. I wanted to self-isolate in the beginning. I had been quietly monitoring the spread of this virus since the beginning of January. When I heard Trump say that only 15 people in the US had it and that number would soon be zero, I thought, Oh man, we’re fucked. This was on February 9th. I was monitoring the spread in other countries as well. I remember watching Italy and watching the cases popping up in my own city. My coworkers had me convinced that I was losing it. They would tell me, “Well, we’re not Italy. That’s not going to happen to the US.” They has me convinced for a while too. I was sitting at my desk during the first week of March thinking, Get it together, Charlie, don’t let your OCD do this to you. You’re still new here. You’re overanalyzing things. It’s just the OCD. Well... fuck that and fuck those people who gaslighted me into questioning what was right in front of my eyes. I walked out of work soon after that day and called my boss and begged him to let me start working from home. I was like, “If I’m wrong, I’ll accept that, but let me make that choice for myself.” And he apprehensively said okay. A week and a half later, everyone at the office was working from home. The first few weeks. I was doing really well the first few weeks of quarantine. I felt much safer at home and could actually focus on my work for the first time in a while. I was feeling lucky to have my job and to be able to easily work remotely without disrupting the work flow of my department. People quickly saw how responsive and hardworking I was at home, and suddenly everyone seemed okay with it. Right after, everyone else followed suit anyway and the fact that I was the first person to make a scene about it kind of faded away. I was almost happy during these weeks too because I got so much time back in my day without having to wake up early to commute or deal with the 5 o’clock traffic. I easily found 3 more hours in my day to sleep and relax. I was more productive than I’d ever been in the office, and people noticed. I’ve gotten several comments from people asking how I possibly finished something so quickly or did something so thoroughly in the allotted time. During this time, all my friends and family also switched to working remotely, so my mind relaxed a lot. I allowed myself the freedom to push the news away a little bit and that was really the best thing for my mental health at the time. Now that I felt safe and felt secure that my loved ones were safe, I didn’t really need to glue myself to it 24/7, so this was the most peaceful few weeks I had in a long time. Beginning of April. End of March/beginning of April is when cases really started spiking exponentially in the US and of course my unease crept back in then. The economic impact became more evident when we saw so many job layoffs and unemployment claims coming in. There were so many people who were ill but were refused testing. There were a lot of medical staff working without proper PPE, people dying alone, etc. Kind of hard to live in your little bubble and just be happy that you’re chill when all these horrible things are happening. The state restrictions kept getting extended, as they should, but it started kind of becoming more evident that this might be a long-term thing. When I initially requested to work from home, I was asking for the immediate time being without even thinking about the future weeks/months/years. I was still mentally doing okay-ish, still thankful for what I have and just wishing I could help everyone else. But being in the house with my thoughts for weeks was definitely starting to wear on my mind. Second half of April - AKA now. That brings us to the past couple weeks. They’ve certainly been rough. Somehow April has gone both quickly and excruciatingly slowly. Work is still going well, but somewhere in the month my anxiety came fully roaring back. Full on nighttime panic attacks, lack of sleep, racing heart, random aches and pains, asthma attacks, etc. have wrecked my schedule and my peace of mind. The push for states to reopen has increased my anxiety tenfold. While I can clearly do my job from home, I worry that my company will force everyone back into the office the second some of the restrictions are lifted. Going to the grocery store is extremely stressful and seeing random citizens in medical masks to pick up milk feels surreal and nearly caused me to dissociate. While I understand the push to reopen due to economic needs, the fact that it has become a partisan issue actually sickens me. Seeing people break social distancing mandates to protest state lockdowns while holding Trump 2020 signs and waving rebel flags tells you everything you need to know about the state of the US right now. I’ll leave most of the political ranting to lizco252isback (  ), but I honestly don’t know how this country is going to fare in the impending recession. I’ve seen multiple Trump 2024 bumper stickers, signs, and online posts. If we don’t get him out this year, we could very well see a dictatorship in a few years here. His supporters are a cult. Not a single person has been able to coherently explain to me why they support him.I have family members who are well-educated telling me that Bill Gates created the virus, that Trump is joking when he says something absolutely insane (because joking during a worldwide pandemic that is killing hundreds of thousands of people is reasonable), and that it’s a violation of their human rights to say they can’t go get their nails done at the salon. As with my boss on Covid-19, I will happily be wrong on this topic. However, with your quarantine time, I implore you to sink your teeth into some research on the rise of previous dictators and tell me that you see no similarities. Rabid supporters who believe their chosen one can do no wrong? Supporters who will believe their chosen one’s words over any contrary evidence? Supporters who believe they are serving a greater moral good that thus negates any action that ever could have been deemed immoral? An impending or active severe economic downturn that causes those supporters to double down? Hey, didn’t we see one of those before that led to something heinous? I don’t know what the answer is to opening the economy back up. I don’t know when that should happen. I don’t believe that just doing it will result in the majority of people re-entering society. We also don’t know if this will create further spread of the virus. There will be much more job loss and despair either way. But I do know for certain that I will not be listening to anyone who suggests in any way that potentially injecting disinfectant into patients could cure the virus. Whether he was joking or not, and we all know he wasn’t. We’re doing that thing where we pretend he was joking because even Trump supporters know how incredibly unintelligent that statement was. It quite frankly sounds like something my niece would have suggested as a possible solution when she was seven. The fact that they think saying that he was joking is even remotely better- during the middle of a fucking pandemic, is astonishingly horrifying. I don’t know where we’ll be after this is all said and done. There are so many unknowns at this point and it’s pretty scary. If I was crying In the van, with my friend It was for freedom From myself and from the land |
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