Making Peace with Postponement: A Coronavirus Story

These two species normally aren’t inclined to come into contact with one another. But San Francisco real estate being what it is, they intersect with growing regularity in our backyard. The raccoons, washing food and not in the mood to share, take offense at having their dinner party crashed. I imagine that the skunks would respond with a raised middle finger if they had that capacity. Instead, they signal their ire in a way only a skunk can. The resulting olfactory insult can be smelled for blocks.  

It’s Saturday, and I go to bed early with a headache. I wake in the middle of the night to the barest whiff of skunk. At odds with this faint odor is my brain, which is at full Defcon Skunk, yelling at me to get up and close the windows. I’m a bit muddled, blame it on the headache, and finally decide to ignore it. Exasperated, my brain switches tacks, insisting that, if I’m not interested in saving myself, then the least I could do is get up and close the windows in the kids’ rooms. This perplexes me even more. I sit up in bed for a few minutes, breathing deeply. Nothing. In the end, the lingering headache wins, and I go back to sleep.

The following morning I wake to missing covers. I track them to the living room couch, wrapped tightly around my husband. He openly wonders how I - a light sleeper with the overactive brain we’ve already met - managed to remain oblivious through Skunkageddon III.

Now of course we know that a loss of smell is one of the calling cards of Covid-19. But that morning, I just feel tired, grumpy, and under the weather. I take another Excedrin, grab an ice pack from the freezer, and head back to bed. I sleep for most of the following 24 hours. And by the time I leave the house again, the world has changed completely.

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I am profoundly unprepared for my visit to the acute care clinic, a medical office transformed into a makeshift Covid-19 facility, the purpose of which is to divert cases from local emergency rooms. Pre-coronavirus, it was a bustling place with a bright waiting room, boasting soaring ceilings and modern touches associated with the clinic’s brand. Now the front doors are locked, with patients admitted by appointment only, spaced an hour apart.

I knock on the front door as instructed, and a nurse appears, swathed head-to-toe in personal protective gear. I am gut-punched by several feelings, the first being embarrassment. I left the house as I last had weeks ago, in the Before. My last-minute consideration to Covid-19 is a scarf wound somewhat carelessly around my neck so that I can pull it up over my face.

In the presence of the PPE-clad admin nurse, I feel nervous and woefully under-swathed. I’m let in, the doors locked behind me with a brisk click that is vaguely unsettling. Sitting pristinely in the middle of a tray on a clinical table in front of me is a single surgical mask. I am ridiculously relieved to have it.

As I follow my nurse to an exam room, we pass others in full PPE, faces indiscernible beneath masks and shields except for their eyes. Those eyes follow me, communicating a mix of both kindness and wariness. It’s then that I realize: what they are wary of, what they are protecting themselves from, is me.

The exam room itself has been stripped down from its previous duty as a regular office. No office decor remains, save for a high shelf that holds a collection of plants in various stages of neglect. A new nurse bustles in to take vitals and ask questions, and I resist the urge to mention the plants to her. She squints at me. “You certainly don’t look like you feel well!” she cheerfully proclaims.

When it’s time to undress for a battery of tests, we run into a conundrum: gowns. There aren’t any stocked in the sterile room. As my nurse starts to call for one, she hesitates. It’s late March, early in the pandemic, and all resources are precious. I read the hesitation and joke that my boobs have been long retired from flashing people, and would likely be flattered to do so again, so let’s make their day. We laugh and trade flashing stories as I proceed to remove my shirt and bra. It’s a silly, all-too-brief moment of levity and human connection. Tests are run. As others are brought in for consults, my nurse stands at a strategic angle in front of the exam table while my overly-exposed chest and I recline, sporting a riot of sticky pads and wires. Somehow, this scenario feels absurdly normal.

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In the end, I spend four weeks in the company of Covid-19 and its sidekick, Covid pneumonia. I took to sleeping fully dressed in case a hospital trip was necessary, but thankfully, it never was. It takes another four weeks to start to feel my energy and drive return. And if I wasn’t prepared to reckon with the beating my cardiovascular system took, I was even less prepared for one of my mental side effects: zero emotional resilience. As a card-carrying Type-A personality, ‘getting back up on that horse’ is my favorite pastime. This was different. I tried throwing myself back into work, but the mental demands brought on anxiety attacks. Even typically enjoyable projects –like The Creative Factor–were challenging in ways I hadn’t anticipated. Some of the stories we had planned felt off somehow–useful to a time that wasn’t now, and might never be again. Our editorial calendar became my enemy. After spending so much time in forced interruption, I came to the unwelcome realization that it wasn’t nearly enough.

“When this storm clears, we may, as do people who have survived a serious illness or accident, see where we were and where we should go in a new light,” writes Rebecca Solnit in The Guardian. “We may feel free to pursue change in ways that seemed impossible while the ice of the status quo was locked up. We may have a profoundly different sense of ourselves, our communities, our systems of production and our future.” 

For the first time in my life, I take a deep breath, and permit myself to just…be.

What I notice in my extended interruption: birdsong. How sunlight plays across my office in the afternoon, and how grateful I am for it. How my kids–supposedly in school–sneak my door open, make a heart sign with their hands, point to me, and retreat again with a smile. 

I notice that my biggest fear doesn’t come to pass. Buried deeply somewhere in my overactive brain is the belief that if I stop doing All The Things, disaster will surely follow. That just holding space for myself isn’t enough, because my worth as a human is dependent on what I can do for others. It’s a false equation that many of us nevertheless buy into: boundaries = rejection. For different reasons, this is a tough one for me to reconcile. 

What I find in my interruption is compassion. Instead of the quiet, passive dismissal I had braced for, I instead found an outpouring of caring and support. It floored me. It also gave me the courage to begin - tentatively - to set boundaries, and to believe that is ok. Those boundaries have allowed me the space to find a contentment that I hadn’t expected, and in that, I’ve found a deeper connection to what brings me joy. In those ways, this experience has been a gift. 

Traumatic events invariably change you. My tussle with Covid was challenging physically; emotionally, the journey it took me through during this pandemic - in concert with over 6 million people across the world as of this writing - has left an indelible mark. I know I am incredibly lucky. And I’m grateful - so very, very grateful - to come away from this with a renewed perspective. I’m not going to do All The Things, but I hope to have the opportunity to create a few things, and that those things are lasting and meaningful – for my family, for myself. And hopefully, for others. 

And when Skunkageddon IV: The Next Insult dropped in the backyard, I definitely noticed. The hideous smell woke me from a deep sleep, eyes watering. I was overjoyed.

Amanda Tuft is co-founder of The Creative Factor. She lives by the creative mantra can’t-not-do-the-thing and has the gift of seeing potential in, well, just about everything.