The chest tightness triggers anxiety, and the anxiety increases the chest tightness. Spring allergies trigger asthma which triggers sneezing which triggers more anxiety and irrational fears of infection. And so it goes.
Five weeks of stay-at-home and an extension through mid-May does little to alleviate the anxiety, as well as the guilt about my anxiety. I begin to feel like I should be stronger or not feel claustrophobic or be more thankful for how good I have it. I feel that I am in some way weak or ungrateful because I'm not doing this pandemic-thing perfectly.
Well child, none of us are.
Psychologists call this meta-emotion. It's when you feel emotion about your emotion. There's lots of that going around these days. We feel feelings about our feelings. It's layered and nuanced, interconnected and complex. It can be explained on a psychological level, but that certainly doesn't alleviate the unpleasantness.
So I've been working on moving through the feelings, letting them pass over me or me pass through them, whichever makes the most sense in that moment. And I've been working on not judging myself for feeling what I feel. As a friend reminded me last night, Be gentle with yourself.
I needed to get out of my head--get out of my apartment really--so I volunteered. I signed up online and hopped on a mostly empty subway train towards downtown. Approximately twelve volunteers gathered in the Anna Wintour Volunteer Center at God's Love We Deliver. All of us kept our distance from one another, wearing masks, heads buried in our phones, afraid to make too much eye contact because, who really knows how this virus spreads?
We were divided into two groups for meal deliveries to New Yorkers who can't get out to get food on their own. Most people went with the 72nd Street bound volunteers. I grouped with the 42nd Street crew because I knew I could walk home after and avoid the train.
The bags of food were bigger than we expected. We organized the meals with the assigned addresses and one of my delivery partners said in a shaky voice, "I can't take the train."
But with such weighty bags, it was apparent we would have to. So I helped route our path to get us as quickly as possible to Times Square on the E Train. It would take only about 12 minutes.
One volunteer had walked 90 minutes from Brooklyn to avoid taking the subway. So getting on this train was going to be a remarkable leap of faith for him.
But leap on the train we did. We distanced in the middle of the car while a couple of homeless people slept on the other end. One awoke and began to cough violently. You could see the sputum spray through the air to the other side of the car.
One in my group fled to the opposite end of the car, a wild look of terror in his eyes. Our eyes met, and no explanation was needed. He clearly did not want to be infected. When we got off the train, I assured him we would be above ground very soon.
And then it began.
As we trekked through the long underground corridor, people began to approach us. We were no speedy Meals on Wheels, slogging these clear, plastic bags of food. So it was easy for people to catch up to us.
People asked where we got the food or if they could have some of what we had. One man said he didn't want food, only a warm coat, as it was a cold spring day.
Years earlier I had learned to discern the look of hunger in a person's eyes, through my many experiences in Haiti. When you look deeply into the eyes of someone who is genuinely hungry, you sense both humility and desperation.
On any normal day in New York City, most people begging on the streets are fairly sophisticated in their approach. They hold signs with funny quips or emotional pleas, which often are enough to open the wallets of passing tourists.
These people on this very un-normal day were not that way. There were no clever signs. They carried the recognizable look of desperation, and I knew the hunger and need were genuine. For hunger is the same whether traversing subterranean tunnels of New York City or the back bushes of Haiti.
I delivered my meals, hanging the bag on the doorknob, knocking loud, then backing up six feet. "This is God's Love," we were told to announce to the recipients. If there is such a thing as God's Love, surely it looks like this: human hands serving another human in time of need.
I ventured back towards Time Square and stopped at a friend's locally-owned coffeeshop. I ordered a latte and an additional hot coffee for the cold, homeless man out front, as the barista verified that he was in genuine need.
But I am not so certain his genuineness or lack thereof really matters. Everyone seems to carry a degree of desperation these days, whether a hunger in the belly or a hunger in the soul. Freely giving a hot coffee on a cold day says more about the heart condition of the benefactor than it does the supplicant. For freely we have received, freely we give.
As I walked through an empty Times Square during lunch hour, my senses were once again assaulted by the grim, apocalyptic cityscape that typifies this city these days. My chest was still tight but not quite as anxious, and my emotional state ceased to matter as much as it had before.
Recent Comments