Holding The Line
For lack of a better word, this week has been intense.
I came downstairs after work one day, prepared for dinner, only to find my dad locked in his office and my mom sitting at the kitchen table, terror in her eyes. She said my dad was working out when he suddenly felt weak, and he felt like he had a fever.
It felt like the floor fell out from underneath my feet. Suddenly, there were so many fears in my head that hadn’t been there seconds before: did he have the virus? Even though he doesn’t have any pre-existing conditions, would he get a bad case? Would he need to go to the hospital? What about Mom, who spends a ton of time with him? And I wasn’t distancing from him either, how was my breathing? And most importantly, I felt the urgent need to call my Nana, who turns 92 later this summer and has heart problems, since he had been in her apartment just four days before.
In the immediate moment, I was able to squash this down and come up with a rudimentary plan for that night. I threw on my mask and ran upstairs to my room, grabbing basic supplies and preparing to stay downstairs with my mom until we knew for sure. When the panic did hit, she reassured me that she would be the one to deliver him food and other supplies, and I gladly volunteered to go to CVS and pick up a pulse ox machine (even though they terrify me) because it got me out of the house. I could sit alone in my car and breathe freely.
Even though I don’t have nightmares often, I wasn’t too surprised to have one that night, but I was surprised when I woke up to sounds of distress. I was sleeping in my parents’ room, and Dad was still in his office-turned-quarantine-room, but Mom was just arriving home from a walk where she’d fallen and gotten hurt. Her ankle looked like a baseball, and even before I could get my contacts in, I was filled with so much dread I had no idea what to do with it.
It fell on me, then, to not only take care of my dad who potentially had the virus, and whose temperature climbed up to 102 degrees that day, but to take care of Mom and of my dog, who is elderly and has problems with fecal incontinence (which triggers my OCD just like his puppyhood accidents), all the while praying to hear Nana’s voice on the phone saying that she was safe and sound.
It was dinnertime when I finally broke. It was Friday, and on Fridays, I love to reward myself for making it through the work week with my favorite food - baked ziti. I knew my favorite place right down the street experienced a fire right after reopening from the pandemic, so I called my backup place, only to hear that they’d taken it off the menu.
It’s such a small thing in the grand scheme of everything going on that day, from the walks and medications for the dog to delivering things upstairs while trying as hard as I could to not breathe even with a mask on, but it broke me. I couldn’t stop crying, and even when we ultimately agreed to get pizza, I was despondent when I picked it up, grumbling the entire time that we’d stopped going to this place years ago because it wasn’t even that good, and I didn’t even want pizza anyway. I convinced myself, by the time I got home, that I would need to make enough trips to bring up multiple slices of pizza and sodas to Dad that I wouldn’t be able to eat while the food was still warm, and I further convinced myself that since it wasn’t what I really wanted, I could spite this stupid situation by not eating at all.
I did end up eating dinner, in the end - my stubborn resolve broke at the smell of garlic rolls - but it still took me a while to calm down. Later that night, just as Mom and I had talked the previous night, I started to confess how the ANTs were piling up in my head, and that’s why I’d been distracting myself all day with everything possible. Often, I had my Nintendo Switch in one hand and my phone in the other, making sure there was something other than anxiety in my head every second.
She asked me if I was doing the right thing that I’d learned in cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) - wasn’t I supposed to be challenging my negative thoughts instead of simply pushing them away? I thought about it briefly, and tried to isolate a thought - and then I found the problem. I was being assaulted by so many powerful ANTs at once that it felt like a tsunami, each individual ANT indistinguishable from the horde.
I learned, in CBT, to write down a thought, classify what kind of thought it was from a list, and reframe the thought in a healthier way. But with so many coming in at once, I needed to escape from the immediate flood in order to be able to focus. In other words, I needed the ANTs to line up rather than pour over me like ocean waves, and once I gave myself time and permission to seek distractions and things that make me happy, I was able to isolate individual things I was worried about and talk through them.
Ever since this realization, even though I’m still staying in Mom’s room as she recuperates and taking care of the dog and making deliveries to my dad while calling Nana a little too much just to make sure she’s not coughing, I have stopped being ashamed of my need for distractions. I’ve taken long walks by myself in the mornings, making up stories in my head and sinking into my imagination while catching pokemon. I’ve cultivated my Animal Crossing island into a beautiful paradise, and when Lord of the Rings Online came out with an expansion that included one of my favorite scenes from Return of the King, I gave myself a whole evening to play it, even though I could have been doing more productive things.
Any one of these complications to normal life would be enough to make me spiral. But with all of them happening at once, it’s essential for me to take time to calm down. Once I’ve been playing for a while - like I did for a while before I wrote this post - I’m able to process what’s going on in a more organized and less panicked fashion.
I hope that my dad will get a negative result on his COVID-19 test since he’s been feeling better, and he’ll be able to move downstairs again and everything will go back to the tentative normal we formed during such crazy times. But in the meantime, I have a strategy - a new combination of distraction and processing that will let me hold the line against the armies of ANTs that are inevitable in tough times.
Ellie, a writer new to the Chicago area, was diagnosed with OCD at age 3. She hopes to educate others about her condition and end the stigma against mental illness.