Texts In Times of Covid
MAY 10, 2020
People love to text. It’s not just young people, it’s all people. Texts with little emoji‘s or worse, texts with bitmojis and gifs.
It’s is the most we can be bothered with. A way to contain our interactions with others. We can even copy our texts and just send them out to each person as if they were an original. Who would know? I will also acknowledge that many people are using their phone for FaceTime, for zoom gatherings to learn share and discuss different things during quarantine and isolation.
But I also contend that for things that matter the most, like feelings, hiding behind texts is still the preferred method. It’s also the worst method. I’d rather get nothing, than a bunch of empty texts. It’s like getting a card that contains only a signature beneath the pre-printed message. Why bother?
On Mother’s Day, a Hallmark holiday at best, it triggers a lot of feelings for most people. I think of the last time I spent Mother’s Day with my own mother in 1994. We went to Chase Park in the Marina. My kids were little, I was still married, my mother was still alive, but it was not the best day. If I had it to do over again I wouldn’t bother changing a thing because it really is just a Hallmark holiday.
This year it’s backfired on Hallmark, because we are not shopping and we are not sending flowers and we are not even gathering with family and friends to share food. We can’t share life and we can’t share death anymore.
My feeling is why bother with the celebration? What are we really celebrating? Our mothers? A complicated and strained relationship at best. A relationship we look at and evolve with over our entire lives. Even when we become mothers ourselves, our relationship issues with our own mother continues whether they are dead or alive. I think of Mother’s Day like Valentine’s Day; it’s a day that makes most people feel shitty. And a day that costs a lot of money for nothing of value.
I cannot make the best of a bad situation; I’m just trying to stay alive. I feel trapped and overwhelmed. I am sick from chemo too much of the time, and unless you are too, you cannot understand.
People are suddenly relaxing their isolation rules. But how am I supposed to relax mine? Nothing has changed. There still can be asymptomatic carriers. The virus is still spreading. There are 80,000 people dead. After being in quarantine for so long, it seems foolish to suddenly decide to mix with people especially when the people I would mix with are mixing with other people.
Fuck all the text messages from today. They do nothing to lift my spirits. They offer no chance for an exchange of energy, for truly being seen or heard. I hope they make the sender feel good, they certainly don’t make me feel good.