A Pandemic By Any Other Name
Some people, myself included, have noticed a hesitation when invoking COVID-19 either explicitly or figuratively to contextualize circumstances in our lives. I often can’t decide whether to say, “The Coronavirus”, “The Pandemic”, or pull a Mike from Jersey Shore with just, “The Situation”. Although the facts, headlines, and frontline accounts have been harrowing, many of us have been fortunate enough to be personally untouched by The Virus itself. What has transpired in many pockets of the world to be a level of devastation on par with an apocalyptic sci-fi summer blockbuster is to many of us isolators the polar opposite genre: a minimalistic portrait of solitude and domesticity that would probably win a bunch of indie awards but bore the living hell out of our parents due to its lack of conventional “plot”.
The scenes borne out of The Virus span everything from medical workers consoling patients who are dying without loved ones by their side, to twenty-somethings experimenting with sourdough starter in their loft apartments. This is emblematic of the bizarre dichotomy in this apocalyptic scenario that Hollywood did not prepare us for. ‘War of the Worlds’ somehow left out the plot line of how the alien invasion finally convinces some guy in his thirties to get really into hydroponic gardening. Standing in a line that stretches around the block with hundreds of other masked customers to enter Trader Joe’s is definitely unsettling at first, but after a few minutes, the eeriness fades to the back of your mind and you find yourself wondering if they’ll have your favorite mushroom and gruyere flatbread in stock.
The day-to-day challenges defined by The Virus are messy and, well, undefined. We are all affected, but we are not all affected equally, and to think otherwise is to minimize the havoc it has unleashed upon its victims (this idea is not unique to The Virus, see: systemic racism). Even those of us significantly affected by the consequences of The Virus — whether we’ve lost our jobs, or have suffered from increased mental health problems as a result of isolating — are still tangential to the main event, and putting our personal experiences during this time into the context of a deadly virus with which we may not have come into contact at all is counterintuitive and a minimization in and of itself. It feels wrong for me to invoke The Virus as the reason I haven’t finished writing my screenplay, because neither I nor any of my loved ones have had The Virus, and if I did, my creative motivation or lack thereof would be the least of my worries.
None of this is a criticism of anyone’s coping mechanisms. I’ve done my fair share of bread-baking and crafting over the last few months. And to bring this to an anticlimactic conclusion, I don’t really have an answer to this whole train of thought, because it’s still chugging along. I will probably continue to beat around the bush when referencing “these days”. But dissecting those feelings of hesitation is sometimes the end goal. Delving into why our instincts are telling us something is off is not always enough to change those instincts, but can be enough to broaden our perspective, and that is something to strive for.
