Items

• 
  2021-12-20

  And a Happy New Year

  My boyfriend and I had visited his parents over our Christmas Holiday from college. They had just recently gotten back from Hawaii, so they had travelled through several airports to get to and from Baton Rouge. Despite my boyfriend and I being vaccinated and wearing masks around his family, we came to find out that his mother had COVID (she is a staunch anti-vaxxer). Not one week after our visit, my boyfriend and I both tested positive. We spent Christmas and New Years holed up in our tiny apartment, feeling guilty that we had been to our respective works and to visit my relatives without knowing we were positive. His mother is still suffering from COVID complications, nearly eight months after originally having it. I'll never understand why people assume that public health and health education are a hoax. It could have saved everyone a lot of time and effort and suffering if the truth about vaccinations wasn't barraged by misinformation and public hysteria.
• 
  2022-01-03

  It finally happened

  We’re two months short of the two year anniversary of the Covid outbreak here in the US. My family of four followed the rules, masked up, quarantined and my husband and I were vaccinated as soon as we were able. This holiday season we found ourselves living life as we had before Covid, we got too comfortable. Our children are small and we were still unsure if we wanted to get our six year old vaccinated. We went into public spaces unvaccinated, participated in all the family Christmas festivities and then we got sick. I thought it was a cold at first and then one day it dawned on me that my sense of smell and taste were gone. Then the guilt and shame set in. We got too comfortable, we lost sight of the fact that Covid is not gone. People are still dying. My husband and I are fine, it’s like a cold with the added adventure of not being able to taste anything. I worry for my kids though. I feel guilty that we didn’t get my oldest vaccinated. I hate to watch her fight this with only over the counter medication to help her. I feel for my three year old. I hope they don’t get worse. This was a rude awakening for us all, Covid is not gone.
• 2021-10-17

  The Covid Disconnect

  The story and my experience are an example of the many ways in which the pandemic affected individuals in different ways. It goes without saying that each person was impacted in varied ways due to Covid-19, however, not all of them were either explicitly negative or an outcome that is easily defined as being either beneficial or harmful. During the height of the pandemic in the United States, I was employed as an Assistant Warehouse Manager in Green Bay, WI. My workload and responsibilities were already a little taxing, but once things got in full swing with Covid they became even more so. I went from working an average of 60 hours a week to over 75. This was mainly due to about a third (or more) of our employees being out of work due to quarantine-type measures or actual illness. This went on for months at the beginning. Many weeks out of that time period there were as few as about a dozen of us running three shifts in a warehouse that normally employed roughly 40 workers. Also at this time, my wife became unemployed because her place of employment shut down. Others around me were losing their jobs in droves and facing financial hardship. But due to my position and the nature of the job, I had never had more job security and we never faced any kind of financial difficulties. On the contrary, during the entire pandemic, my wife and I never went without or struggled. This gave me a surreal feeling and one that I almost felt guilty for living through. Aside from some minor changes in my daily life, I barely noticed any personal changes due to Covid. All in all, it was an extremely odd time to live through; the pandemic wasn't necessarily bad for my wife and me, but I know it was for countless others. And that made it all the more strange.
• 
  2021-08-11

  Hobbies and Quarantine

  I have been lucky in this pandemic. My partner was able to keep his job and with the pause on student loan payments, we were able to save enough money to put a downpayment on a house. Quarantine and working from home have allowed the both of us to explore hobbies we have always wanted to have but couldn't because of the time spent commuting or lack of space because we were renting. I was able to start my own herb garden and it flourished. I have learned a lot about myself during the pandemic, and one of those things is that I love gardening and working with plants. I know we have been so much luckier than so many people and that often creates feelings of guilt in me. I don't like sharing my happy stories because so many people are having a hard time right now. I do think the good stories are just as important as the stories of hardship. I don't take what I have for granted and my partner and I still try to donate and help out where we can, but nothing has brought me happiness like my herb garden.
• 
  2021-07-10

  Dear Diary: A Quarantine Reflection

  My submission to the Journal of the Plague Year is a reflection on the process of writing diary entries about living through a quarantine period at my summer program at Phillips Academy Andover. It talks through my feelings of anxiety and guilt, as well as feeling a sense of distance from the rest of the world during the seven day period, and explains how keeping a diary can help you understand your own emotions during a difficult time.
• 
  2021-04-05

  Two Shots of Guilt

  Being an older adult, I qualified for vaccines before those who work. I am overwhlemed with gratitude and guilt that I am safe from COVID and others are not.
• 
  2021-03-09

  Volunteer Vaccine

  My name is Erica Ruhland and I was a senior online during the Covid-19 Pandemic. I live with my two grandparents. Both are in their late 70’s, and because of them, I have been taking the pandemic extremely seriously. This year has been a constant battle of inner turmoil. My moral compass has been spinning for over a year now. The following has been some of the struggles and sacrifices I have made over the course of the year: Quarantining from my grandparents for 12 days in my room, multiple times Cutting my work hours to limit possible exposure Quarantining from my boyfriend for 4 months. I had several close calls where I had worked with someone who then tested positive for Covid-19. Each time it would send me into an emotional spiral of guilt. Guilt for working in a customer service job. But it was this job that was paying for my school and gave me health insurance. I couldn’t be without health insurance during a pandemic. But I felt a great deal of shame and guilt over my minimum wage job. I had already cut my hours down, but I was stuck between making a living and staying alive. The constant battles with customers, begging with them to put on a mask, or just simply having to nod when they denied Covid’s existence began to take its toll on my soul. This pandemic has turned me bitter. I have seen too many cruel humans refuse to help their fellow neighbors. A simple mask has the potential to destroy or save my grandpa’s life. HandsOn Greater Phoenix is a volunteer program that helps find volunteers for several campaigns across the state. They were in charge of organizing the volunteer program for the “Vaccinate State 48” initiative. This is how I got the vaccine. The rule was, you had to volunteer at the State Farm Arena vaccination site for 8 hours and then you could receive the vaccine shot afterwards. After battling out for a volunteer spot online, I had secured a spot for me to help out on March 9th, 2021. From 6am to 2pm, I stood outside and directed traffic. I was one of the last volunteers people would see. After they received their shot, I would direct their cars out of the massive parking lot. I saw so many older citizens that day. Each time I couldn’t help but think of my own grandparents. As I waited in line, sitting in my car after volunteering, I felt a huge wave of emotion. It was a mixture of exhaustion, relief, fear, and joy. I started talking to the nurse and I told her that I was nervous for the shot but also really happy. This is when I began to tear up and cry. After the shot, I felt a huge weight lifted from me. All the sacrifices I had made to keep myself and my family safe, they were worth it. I had done my part to help not just myself or my loved ones, but my community, strangers that I may never meet again. My moral compass aligned North once more. I felt validated. I used the small power I have to effect a big change in my community. My bitterness began to fade. Even now, a month later, I still think about the other volunteers, they all believed we were helping effect great change and saving people. It was like a religion. I had been baptized with the vaccine. On that day I felt like I belonged to a church, preaching to the community. Our sermons were us showing the elders where to drive, and how to schedule their next dose. Our gospel was Phfizer and we sent missionaries out to spread the good news. My sign of piety was the sunburn on my neck where I had forgotten sunscreen and my vaccine papers. This sense of purpose and passion is I’m sure the driving force behind every religion. This pandemic has shown me the worst of people. I will not forget it. This pandemic has shown me the great lengths I and others will go to, to protect their community. I will never forget that. There is strength in a common goal. Vaccinate Sate 48.
• 
  2021-04-02

  Christopher Martin Testifies at Trial

  Christopher Martin, 19, who reported George Floyd’s counterfeit $20 bill to his manager, said he feels like a “contributing factor” in his death.
• 
  09/20/2020

  Joey Attalah Oral History, 2020/09/20

  This interview shows the life of a high school graduate in the middle of the COVID-19 Pandemic. Joey graduated from Cambridge Rindge & Latin School in 2020, missing out on his final season of lacrosse brought sadness, although not the same sadness that people took pity on him for. He found joy in being with his family, especially during his virtual graduation.
• 
  April 27, 2020

  Plague Journal, Day 46: Regret, guilt, shame

  I'm keeping a Covid-19 journal. In the latest edition, The Kid, The Girlfriend, St. Paul, St. Augustine, three rabbis, Bill Wilson, a couple of therapists and I discuss notions of guilt, shame, sin, and apology.
• 
  2020-05-23

  Questions without answers

  It feels selfish to start off this writing with the word “I”. Usually I am able to separate from the world’s sorrow and live within myself. But there is so much all the time. How much of my life right now should be considered a joke? Am I allowed to think of myself? The number of people dying in this country and at the rate that they are dying are statistics that I find I cannot comprehend. Usually I do well with things that are broken into numbers. Percentages and facts I can lay out in front of me and apply to a population. But this amount of death, from the unseen antagonist, is brutal. It is painful. I don’t allow myself to think of all of the people who have died, or their families, or friends, because I think that I would not move for a very long time. I don’t like to think of my friends who are working in hospitals. I wonder if they’re scared, and then I am scared for them. Each day I read the newspaper and look for some hope. Is it sad that hope relies on less people dying? And yet there are still deaths? Thank goodness, I think, that just 300 people have died instead of last week’s 700. Are we built to handle these numbers? I don’t know what to do. My mom is immunocompromised. It feels dangerous to leave the house for more than a grocery run. Am I selfish to see my friends? How long will this last? And how can I be thinking of myself when so many people are dying everyday, and risking their lives, and dying from this risk? I read an article recently that said something like “how can we ask those to stay home for society when they are the ones that society has forgotten?” How do I help these people? Why am I scared to look for ways to help? My mom told me to look for part-time jobs recently. She only asked one time, in a sort of forceful way, and I assured her that I would. But I can’t. I can’t bring that to our house. How do I not feel grief all the time? My friends and I social-distance from each other. And we laugh, and we talk, and we drink and just be together. It is a small relief. But am I allowed this relief? Why do I get to have these things when others can’t? Who am I to sit in this room, and type on this computer, and not have overwhelming fear for my life, not only of getting sick but of feeding my family? Sometimes I’ll be laying in bed, and I’ll just feel an ache between my ribcage. I know it is my anxiety. I haven’t had an attack for a while, but I know where it lives, and I can’t say that it is sleeping right now. Every once in a while it wakes, and locks its self onto my ribs, and pulls them taut, not enough for me to start breathing heavily, but just enough so I know that it’s there. Sometimes I’ll feel like crying. Sometimes I am so happy, usually when I’m with my family, that something wells in my chest and I feel as if I’m going to burst. I am so grateful and thankful for our health and our safety. I am privileged to the nth degree. Other times I feel like crying because I forget what is happening in the outside world, and then I remember. It feels like I am a pencil that has been dulled from overuse, from ignoring and not feeling everything that is happening everywhere. And then something happens, and I read an article or watch a video or picture someone’s family, and the pencil is sharp, and the writing is fresh, and it burns on the way down. I feel like crying too when I am frustrated. I am frustrated with how my life is being lived right now. My mom told me that she is okay 99% of the time. But that 1%, when she realizes that my brother and I’s lives have been put on hold, she freaks out. My parents have always asked me what I plan on doing with my life, what my next steps are, where am I going. Those questions fall flat for me now. How can I plan for this life? Where should my next steps take me? Has my path changed for where I am going? And how do I deserve to feel like this? Am I allowed to feel frustrated with what is happening to me? I cried recently watching an episode of Avatar. The main character was so angry and sad and frustrated, that he went into himself, and almost caused mass destruction. His friend waited, and looked sad, and slowly grabbed him. He fell into her arms and started crying for what he lost. I started crying too. How much have I lost that I don’t realize? Nobody is grabbing me, and pulling me down, and holding me. Can I expect that from others who are going through the same things? How much can I expect from the people in my life during this shared experience? How do we support each other? Every discussion I have with my friends, and my family, anywhere these conversations take place, always feel to me to be tinged with a sense of un-reality. None of us are supposed to be here. The plans that we are making together should not exist. The happiness that I draw from these interactions is true, and a relief, and a much-need salve. But how long can these things last? The need for normalcy and the need to acknowledge the tremendous amount of death are at such odds with each other. And my guilt is overwhelming. For not doing anything now, but also for the times before the pandemic when death and inequality were still happening and I was still doing nothing. How do I reconcile the image I have of myself with my actions? How can I claim to care so much about what’s happening now, when I have done nothing in the past? I left Kingston on March 18th. I have discovered that I usually do well in emergencies. When my parents called me at 10 p.m. on March 17th, and told me that I needed to be packed for noon the next day, I told my housemate what I needed to do and did it. At first I felt some relief. I had been so nervous about my family for about a week, and I was so far from them. I thought often about an interview question I had had during the first week of March. They asked me what I would do if there was a zombie apocalypse. What I told them, and what the first thing that came to mind was, that I would try to get back to my family as soon as possible. This isn’t a zombie apocalypse, but that anxiety and urgency were still there. Get across the border before it closes. Leave your friends and work behind. Say goodbyes swiftly. Make it easier for yourself. March 17th is St. Patrick’s Day. My housemate and I had watched the first two of the original Star Wars movies. A friend had come by to pick-up a stereo. On the chalkboard door to my housemate’s bedroom we had listed the things we were going to do during the short quarantine we believed we were under. Smoke weed. Star Wars movie marathon. Play cards. I guess my housemate wiped it off after I left. It didn’t take long for me to pack up all my stuff because I didn’t plan on being in Kingston for longer than three months. I went to bed afterwards. I thought back to the way that I felt when I witnessed a car crash one day in high school. My best friend was driving us. I think I slept three-hours the night before because of an assignment. A car coming out from a stop sign slipped on the ice and T-boned the left-turning car. I started crying immediately; my friend told me to call 9-1-1 and got out of the car to check on the drivers. When I called, I couldn’t tell them where we were, or what street we were on, even though we were a few blocks from my house. After we got to school I went to the nurse’s office and cried. I never wanted to feel like that again. The day after I packed my things two of my best friends came over to take what alcohol and food I had left. It was embarrassing what I had stocked up for when I thought I was staying for longer. I was angry at myself for spending the money, and angry at my friends for taking it from me. I was mad that they got to stay, and sad that I had to leave them, and anxious to get home as soon as possible. They arrived at my house a few hours before my dad came, and I was angry at them as soon as they walked into the house. I wanted them to leave so that I could check the box off my to-do list. Saying goodbye to friends. I needed them gone because their presence in my house, such an anomaly on a Wednesday morning, just emphasized the irregularity of our lives. I barely spoke to them and hugged them goodbye much earlier than they anticipated. I didn’t care if I had hurt them because I was hurting all over, aching, needing them to be gone. As soon as they left I cried. I started sobbing, huge, heaving, wracking sobs, that betrayed me to myself. My housemate sat by silently and handed me a box of tissues. It was so much easier for her to see me like this than the others. She and I were friends, and had spent so much time together, but she didn’t know me eight weeks earlier. While I cried I told her how scared I was that I was a carrier and was going to infect my mom, and how much I wanted to get home despite it. I cried for the anxiety that I was feeling towards everyone and everything, like if someone touched me I would probably crumble. Another friend stopped by and I steeled myself to her too. I loved these people but their presence at my door meant my reality was true. The weather on the drive home with my dad was beautiful. One of the things that this pandemic has made me realize is that for all the things that humans pride themselves on controlling, the weather is something insurmountable. We are at its mercy, and although hundreds of thousands of people have died from this virus, the weather will never reflect our mood. If anything, this is a blessing, a reminder that ultimately life does not stop, that the rain does not pour because we are feeling sad, and the sun does not shine because we need the flowers to grow. We can take stock in its presence, and breathe these coincidences as if they were meant for us, and it can bring us joy, and hope, and sadness. But the weather will keep on changing, and so will we. Two days after coming home, my dad and I flew down to South Carolina to drive my brother and his friend home. I have recently started having trouble with flying. I have flown all the time for a large part of my life, to many different countries around the world. But at some point a flight changed from a break in travel to a long-block in a journey from getting one place to another. I have started to feel an anxiety in the pit of my stomach, a different feeling than my normal one, probably something that I’d classify as dread. I am now tempted to sleep through the flights, and just go from one place to another without the excruciating in-between, without acknowledging the clouds and the large oceans and plots of land that they cover. Our flight to South Carolina reminded me of these feelings. These feelings kind of remind me of the present too. I open the paper and read the news everyday, with a sense of “Are we there yet?” But where is there? And who is we? And should yet, implying a closeness that is just out of reach, be in our vocabulary? The drive back from South Carolina to Connecticut was filled with more urgency than I anticipated. My brother and his friend did not need to be dragged out of bed at eight o’clock in the morning. The drive-thru fried breakfast food was compulsory but felt like an exception to some unnamed rule of not stopping except for necessities. My dad and I drove together, and listened to podcasts, and looked out the window, but it was rimmed with the kind of dread that I felt on the airplane. If we didn’t get home fast enough, would we ever make it? When I was driving into Connecticut, and my dad was half-asleep in the passenger seat, he told me how glad my mom will be when we are all home together. I told him I was happy, but nervous about being an unknown carrier of the virus. He got angry, saying that he was trying to unload his stress by talking with me. When we got home it was great, and we are together again, but it’s not as easy as I thought it would be. I am struggling every day with some cognitive dissonance. I care so much about the world, and the people in it, but how can I say these things without working the same amount to ensure their own safety and happiness? But at the same time, how can I think about putting my family at risk by going further into the world? Where is my place right now? Who am I meant to be during this time? And still, the weather will keep changing, and tomorrow it may rain, or it will be sunny, and I’ll have no say in it.
• 
  2020-04-10

  The Humanities Respond to the Pandemic

  Far from sitting on the sidelines and waiting for the world to return to normal--or assume the shape of a new normal--Suffolk writing and theater faculty are using the pandemic as a teachable moment and bringing their varied expertise to bear in the effort to improve society's resilience in the face of the current health crisis
• 
  2020-05-24

  Analei _________, my best friend 03/12/2019 imagine was taken

  These photographs explain how someone can be taken from you so fast, as I said earlier Analei did not pass, she is very fortunate because of how many people have been losing their lives due to COVID-19. When I heard the news I freaked out I called her mother and asked her if she was okay, the crazy part is she thinks she got it at a party she went to which what’s weird is that I went to it as well, I was fine and she wasn’t, I personally felt guilty and I was really sad for days and made sure she was okay, since so many people have been getting tested for corona virus the government were very low on test, which meant she had to wait and thankfully found out it was certainly positive, a week has gone by and she was starting to get better, I was so glad. The second photograph is a picture of a doctor, and this shows how every nurse, and doctors have risked their lives for us every day and you start to really see who’s the hero. *The primarily responsible for making this resource would be me, Sofia __________ I am coming to everyone as a human to make sure everyone is safe and healthy *In this time, March 2019 was the month of our graduation into becoming adults and into college students ready for a life, I put a photograph of my friend Analei who was recently tested positive for COVID-19, she is a amazing person and usually most of the bad luck always comes to her for some reason. *Analei _________ and Sofia __________ also her mom ___________ ____________ *The genre of this resource is to show how someone can be taken from you so easily, (even though Analei did not pass) we all had a bit of a scare when we heard the news, her mom took this picture of her as a graduation announcement, little did we know this would happen in our world.
• 
  2020-04-06

  PANDEMIC 2020

  Description of feelings on Boris Johnson getting the COVID-19 virus.
• 
  2020-03-28

  Morning flight: Surreal times

  Walking by oneself in the dawn light I cannot but wish we too could fly away from the surreal nature of this virus. A tiny speck of life, unable to be seen, has felled the economies of the world and the hubris of mankind in the space of 3 short months. My life continues pretty much as usual except only at home whilst food lasts. All my family continue to be employed - we are one of the lucky ones. I wonder if and when guilt will set in?