Sick and Tired

Artwork by Michael DiMilo

By Geoff Carter

People are tired. Exhausted. They’re tired of COVID-19. They’re tired of masks and distancing and washing hands and being careful. They’re tired of other people not wearing masks—and screaming about it. They’re tired of schools closing and having their kids home all the time. They’re tired of not being able to go anywhere or do anything. They’re tired of being out of work, of not having money, of being told what to do. They’re stressed, they’re anxious, and they’re exhausted. 

And they’re sick of hearing about the spikes and the rising death rates and the faltering economy. They’re tired of the same petty politics, the incessant harping, the increasingly frequent mask tantrums, and irrational acts of violence. They’re sick of rampant lies on social media and hearing about what it’s doing to our country. They’re tired of being stuck in a weird limbo between quarantine and normalcy, between solitude and socialization. They’re tired of the uncertainty and sick of the anxiety.

They want answers. Is COVID-19 gone? Or will another variant evolve and cause yet another spike? Will we have to quarantine again? Will schools close? If we try to go back to normalcy too soon, like we did for last Fourth of July, will we suffer yet another spike? Will we have a normal holiday season? No one knows the answers to these questions. All we do know is that we’re tired of not knowing and we’re sick and tired of guessing. 

It’s nerve-wracking not knowing how bad things are or how much worse they might get. When the power happened to go out in our neighborhood for two days last summer, people were upset, complaining that this was like living in a third world country—which may be how they feel about the last eighteen months. They were bewildered. We’re not used to feeling helpless and disconnected and disempowered (no pun intended). It’s hard not knowing who we are anymore.

We’re used to being the land of plenty, but last year’s quarantine provoked a massive wave of hoarding that caused shortages of toilet paper, hand sanitizer, and other sundries. Even now, months after the quarantine was lifted, because of labor shortages and delivery delays, shortages persist. Hundreds of items are presently sitting in warehouses and on docks, unable to ship. As a result, new worries—and a new wave of hoarding—are once again sweeping the country. Supermarkets have empty shelves. Shoppers have been warned to do their Christmas shopping early. And anxiety about the extent of these shortages has provoked a new wave of hoarding; many stores are already out of toilet paper. Many supermarkets have empty shelves.

As a society, we seem to be suffering from a sort of collective emotional exhaustion. One of the major causes of this type of fatigue is long-term stress. As stressors mount—or simply do not go away—fatigue grows and grows, resulting in symptoms that may include mood swings, difficulties sleeping, depression, change in appetite, headaches, weight gain, and confusion. Most of us, on one level or another, have experienced something similar to this during the pandemic. It would stand to reason that once the quarantine was lifted, that many of these stressors would have disappeared, but that has not been the case. Our economy is still foundering, unemployment is still high, and fears about COVID-19 reinfections and variants persist. But that’s not really the ground zero source of what’s worrying most of us.

What Americans are mostly stressed about is not being able to go back to the way things were, when we could go anywhere and (mostly) feel safe, when we could buy whatever we wanted whenever we wanted, when we could visit loved ones without worrying about infecting them, when we believed our economic infrastructure was stable, and when trusted our future. What we’ve been discovering is that we might never return to the way things were. Like Tom Wolfe said, “You can’t go home again.” 

The dawning realization that the losses we have suffered—not only losses of loved ones, jobs, homes, or our health, but of our traditions, our character, our ethos, our very essence, might be, and probably are, permanent, is emotionally devastating. We’ve suffered a sort of cultural death during the past year and a half. 

Casualties include the faith that our fellow citizens are willing to do the right thing, to sacrifice minor inconveniences for the greater good; that belief and trust in the scientific principles that anchor our society have been compromised; that advent of political posturing that has resulted in the bullying and terrorization of school board members, health-care workers, and government officials; that the difficulty of sacrificing social gatherings for the greater good is just too hard. 

We’re not who we thought we were, nor are we who we think we still are. Reaching that moment of cognitive disconnect, of realizing what we’ve truly lost, may turn out to be the greatest stressor of all.