By Mike White
I was at OCD Gamechangers the weekend before the world stopped. It was the last weekend in the “before times.” Aside from seeing way more people washing their hands in the airport bathrooms, and Chrissie kindly acknowledging COVID concerns at the event itself, life was generally going on as it had before. The night of the event I went to a small music venue in Denver and saw a live concert with about 1,000 other people crammed in, shoulder to shoulder, sweating from the body heat of the people moving, dancing, and breathing around me. When will I ever be able to experience something like that again? Or maybe the better question is, will I?
When our eight-year-old daughter mentioned some talk she had heard at school about COVID, we told her that no matter what happened, the way to make it through any crisis is to remain calm while others panicked. Later it became clear that this was really a talk that I should have been giving to myself.
At the time, I was a constant news consumer and the week after Gamechangers was no exception. The virus spread here and there, concerns were mounting, and this was the first time that I felt the COVID cloud descend on me as if there was a big shoe about to drop at any moment. And this began the onset of the COVID anxiety in earnest. I remember that Friday was a slow day at work so I took it upon myself to clear out an old office that was being used as a storage room and reorganize it so our team could use it to have our small team meetings. As more and more news came in, I began to wonder if we’d ever actually get to use the room I had worked so hard on. And as I went home that day, I took a long hard look at our office, my desk, all of my personal items that I had used to make my cubicle my own and I wondered when I would see them again. When would I be back? When would things be normal? And it was over that weekend that schools were closed, we were told to work from home, and so our quarantine began.
Luckily for us our daughter is a champ. She rolls with the punches and she has enjoyed the change of pace. She likes being online for class and honestly, recently she has been excelling in school. Me on the other hand, that’s a different story. In those first few days I was once again glued to the TV. There was nothing I could do in regard to work so all of my time was spent watching the news. And as news continued to come in of more cases and more shutdowns my mood began to drastically change.
I felt like that shoe was not only about to drop, but it was about to drop right on top of my head. Intrusive thoughts and ruminating were in full effect at this point. What if I get sick? What if I die? What if my wife gets sick? What if the economy collapses? What if we lose our apartment? And on, and on, and on; thoughts followed by endless rumination. I wish I could say that has stopped completely, but that wouldn’t be true. What I can say is that it has slowed down, but it is certainly not gone, and from time to time it will spike again. And I wish I could say that my emotional state was less dependent on the outside world, but I’m just simply not there yet.
But that is not to say that I haven’t learned anything over these past nine months or so. I’ve learned a lot more about the anxiety and the OCD that I experience. I learned that perhaps my biggest issue may not solely be with OCD, but with general anxiety as a whole, and that was an area I had not specifically worked on previously. I’ve also learned I need to work on self-love and give myself some slack. We’re going through a rough time right now and being hard on ourselves won’t help.
I think the most important thing I have taken away from this ongoing experience is I now appreciate things more. I appreciate the wind blowing through the trees. I appreciate watching the sunrise. I appreciate the sight of the ocean. I appreciate the people in line in front of me at Walmart (kind of). We’ll get through this and life will go on. Times are hard but there is light at the end of the COVID tunnel and I hope that I will continue to be grateful for the little things.
