The fallacy of dreading things
Building mental fortitude even when it sucks
Earlier this year, I came down with COVID after a work trip. By all accounts, it was a mild case. I'm healthy with no preexisting conditions and would not have been a candidate for Paxlovid, so I took some time off of work and rested as best I could.
You know the symptoms so I won't need to go into them in great detail, but it's important to know that I was down for the count for two weeks. Some days, all I could do was lay down in a silent, dark room and let the hours pass as my entire body throbbed. Even once I was no longer contagious, getting dressed and sitting by the pool for thirty minutes required a multi-hour nap to recover.
And worst of all, once I'd recovered, the brain fog lingered for months. I forgot words and lost my train of thought and felt dull and slow.
For someone who took the pandemic Very Seriously, this was my worst nightmare. At the time, and for the duration of the pandemic, I worked at Starbucks and lululemon, coming into contact with hundreds of strangers every day. If anyone was likely to be exposed to someone contagious, I was convinced it was me. My OCD tendencies surface in unconventional ways and have almost never included handwashing or cleansing, but the week before Ohio shut down my manager sent me home from work because I washed my hands 10 times in an hour, crying over the sink.
Nearly five years on, this feels unbelievably dramatic, but times of uncertainty can either bring out the best or the worst in people and I fear the pandemic brought out some of my worst.
This past week, I've been reading Two Serious Ladies, the 1943 novel from Jane Bowles. Halfway through the book, a down-on-her-luck hotel proprietess in Panama chats with a wealthy-yet-nervous guest about their younger friend Pacifica:
"Pacifica's really been out in the world much longer than I have. You know, she is like an old sea captain. Sometimes I feel very silly when she tells me of some of her experiences. My eyes almost pop right out of my head. It isn't so much a question of age as it is a question of experience. The Lord has spared me more than he has spared Pacifica. She hasn't been spared a single thing. Still, she's not as nervous as I am."
In a book of absurd scenarios and brutally honest characters, it is this speech that stands out. Pacifica is world-weary and has seen far too much at such a young age, and she no longer is surprised by anything the world hands her. Meanwhile, the hotel owner has been fortunate to not experience much tragedy, aside from the death of her husband, and what's developed in her is a nervous constitution so robust she hardly leaves her property. When she finally does, it's nearly catastrophic and she needs to be rescued by the wealthy woman.
I think this speech felt poignant not only because it's some of the most clear thinking presented in the whole of the book, amidst questionable choices by the characters and an odd narrative, but also because it captures a fundamental truth of the human condition. Dread breeds anxiety, and anxiety breeds timidity. Those who run into experiencing the world full-force inherently contain more risk of harm, but they also gamble the risk of experiencing joy and building resilience.
To be certain, the hotel owner and Pacifica are foils for each other, always at odds despite sharing a fierce love for one another. They represent opposite ends of the spectrum: one woman too sheltered and one woman too exposed. Meeting in the middle would be better for all, and I'm certainly not suggesting that we experience hardships the way Pacifica has as some rite of passage to reclaim our humanity. But Pacifica has survived every hardship and developed a sense of resilience that is hard to come by when you stay in a neat and contained space all the time.
Dread breeds anxiety, and anxiety breeds timidity. Those who run into experiencing the world full-force inherently contain more risk of harm, but they also gamble the risk of experiencing joy and building resilience.
All things pass, or so they say, and eventually the synapses in my brain regrew and I felt sharp and verbally-confident once more. It only took about three months post-COVID, which is exceptionally lucky in the grand scheme of things. Three months of symptoms is where the conversation of long COVID begins, and it was a reality I was preparing myself for.
It was obviously not an ideal way to spend a summer—weeks laid up in bed, a full month without any physical activity, months of trailing thoughts and words on the tip of my tongue. I wouldn't recommend it, and I hope to never be so sick again, but in the end I made it through.
Now, on the other end of it and looking back, it seems a bit silly that I ever wanted to avoid it at all. Of course, no one wants to be sick (Gypsy Rose’s mom is rolling in her grave) aside from Munchausen's patients and kids trying to get out of school, so it feels like an obvious statement. But it's interesting to reflect on how the dread I felt over this experience was almost worse than the reality of experiencing it.
When you so badly want something to not happen, it gets built up in your head. That sounds awful, you think. I hope that never happens to me; I'm not sure I could make it through that. But then it does happen and you do make it through it and you realize that it wasn't as bad as you thought.
When you get ill or injure yourself or otherwise experience something out-of-body, you're not enjoying it in the moment but you are thinking: let's just make it through this moment. And this one. And this next one. Until eventually you look bad and realize it's all behind you. There's no prize for suffering the most or being completely unaffected by fear, but building a sense of resilience is reward in and of itself.
To that end, all of the things I've dreaded have turned out to not be so bad in the end as I'd made them out to be: losing a job, being rejected by friends and lovers, paying a visit to the emergency room, getting a bad grade, getting COVID, telling someone honestly how they've hurt me and hearing how I've hurt them in return... I don't want to proselytize that these things make us stronger, only that there are plenty of things in life that if you asked me if I wanted to do them, I would say no, absolutely not.
But then they've happened regardless and I've been through them just fine and it turned out there was nothing to dread in the end.
