got the covid shame blues

Having COVID, I'm feeling a lot of things. Tiredness is the main thing I'm feeling at the moment. But I'm also feeling things like guilt and shame over managing to get myself sick. Not because of anything said to me directly so much as things seen and heard in the background. Due in part to the divide between people who took the pandemic seriously and those who didn't, there seems to be a fair amount of social stigma and scorn, however passive, directed towards those who eventually become infected. People often assume they are unvaccinated or anti-mask or irresponsible and not doing what they can to avoid catching and spreading it. I've seen multiple examples of people making a point to note that they haven't caught it yet, wearing it as a badge of honour and distancing themselves from the rabble who have, pointing out that they're FULLY vaccinated and ALWAYS wear their masks and NEVER go anywhere, with the implications towards those who have it being obvious.

And I get it. It's been a real struggle to get people to take this virus seriously and take all the necessary precautions they can. Working in healthcare, I saw just how bad things could get and it terrified me. For two years, I've been upset at the mediocre government response and have tried to convince people I know who were on the fence to get vaccinated, including patients who were hesitant and asked me about it. But I couldn't run from it forever, and it finally caught up to me. And now I'm one of 'them.' And while I'm lucky that most of the people I know are supportive of me personally, I'm still seeing many say critical things of others who have gotten sick, or make it a point to announce yet again that they haven't gotten COVID for the hundredth time. And it's hard not to take some of that a little personally.

I feel judged to a certain degree. I feel ashamed. I feel unclean. I feel like I'm outside of the community in some way. It's definitely a struggle not to feel bad about myself for something that, in many ways, is beyond my control. My luck simply ran out. Yet it feels like more than that and that it's my sinfulness of some sort that's being punished. Moreover, few who champion their negative status seem to include in those declarations of viral purity any sort of acknowledgement of the luck and privilege that's assisted them, things like the ability to work from home and limit their exposure, living in a house rather than an apartment complex, having personal transportation rather than relying on public transit, not having family members who must go out and risk daily potential exposure (e.g., kids that have to go to school, partners that can't work from home, etc.), the money to order tests and the best masks and constantly have food and groceries delivered for the last two years so that they don't have the leave the house (and does anybody think about the poor people delivering these things?), etc. There's a whole lot of often overlooked luck and privilege involved in staying negative.

That said, I can't entirely begrudge the people who cling to their negative status. Our government has basically taken a personal responsibility approach rather than a systemic, coordinated effort to provide people with supplies; the financial ability to stay home; enact and enforce masking and vaccination mandates, social distancing, and quarantine measures; limit gathering, etc. For the most part, we've been forced to fend off infection during a global pandemic on our own, so there's a lot of pride to be had in not becoming infected, and our culture certainly enforces that. We're conditioned to see everything through the prisms of individualism and self-reliance; and if we've made it in life by getting the perfect job or have managed not to catch a contagious virus, we're made to feel that it's because we deserve it and have done what's required. We put in the hard work. We believed the right things. We have the intelligence and drive necessary for success. The world helps those who help themselves and pull themselves up by their bootstraps (and protect themselves with the boxes of N95s they had delivered from Amazon). And we're all susceptible to this narrative to some extent, and the more we have and the luckier we are, the more susceptible we tend to become.

It reminds me of the biblical Pharisees, who clung to their status of purity and distanced themselves from those they found to be impure, from lepers to the lowly peasants with low-paying and unsavory jobs that nevertheless made the society they lived in possible, quarantining themselves in their temples and wanting for little. They believed in their own righteousness and purity and used their 'cleanliness' both as proof of their own worthiness and as a hammer to strike against the worthiness of others, putting them in their place. It wasn't out of ill-will that they did so, though. It was out of fear of losing what they had and becoming contaminated by the impurities of the world they thought they could outrun, neither seeing how their luck and privilege gave them an advantage, nor how the unlcean were suffering because they were pushed to the margins of society (or even outside of it). It was a defense mechanism, one that appears to come more naturally to those who find themselves part of the 'haves' than the 'have nots.'

And we're not much different. I spent the last two years afraid of catching COVID, both because I was afraid of how sick it would make me and those around me if I spread it, and because I was afraid of being marked as unclean and judged for all the things I probably did wrong to get it. I wasn't as privileged as the Pharisees per se, but I considered myself one of the faithful and held to my negative status as something special, sacred even. And now that I've lost that, I'm somewhat relieved because the fear of getting it is no longer weighing upon me as it once was (although the fear of lasting effects still is), but I'm also struggling with my own feelings of loss and being impure and wondering if we'll ever create a society that manages to welcome, comfort, and care for everyone equally, regardless of their circumstances. And this isn't just about COVID, but any potential divisions we can use to uplift and malign ourselves and others.