Remember when Dr. Craig Spencer caught Ebola in 2014 and the tristate area went up in flames of digital hysteria? I do. I nearly lost my mind. The New York Times published an infographic map overlaying his hour-by-hour symptoms with the places he visited around the city, and I traced our own doings over his, ensuring a safe distance but knowing all the while that if Something Like This ever happened again, I would not be okay. As anticipated, I was not.
For the past nearly two years, I used a similar strategy trying to evade COVID. Alongside my cohorts, I traced, discussed, projected – and yes, judged – all in a well-intentioned-but-anxiety-fueled attempt to keep my family safe. For a long while, this made sense. I could justify my behavior and whatever the fallout was from it.
But it’s time to stop now.
As this new year begins, we are moving into a new phase of the pandemic. The omicron variant is infecting our friends, our circles, our homes. Some are sick and some are not sick at all. I am not a health expert qualified to have an opinion on whether we should stop tracing, stop quarantining, stop anything. But I am a person deeply weighed down by shouldering the burden of difficult choices for a long time. Choices that have sucked and disappointed people and are only right in hindsight because we didn’t get infected. I own my choices. But those choices might not prevent me from getting COVID anymore, and that needs to be okay.
This is the moment for us to stop conflating personal responsibility with infection. For us to stop passing judgment on other people’s choices, autopsying their timelines, trying to catch them in a bad decision. People tend to preface their COVID announcements with, “Despite my double masks and boosters and staying home and being extra careful, it still came for me.” Yes, it did, because maybe your behavior mattered nine months ago, but now it seems that if you leave your house at all, there’s a chance you’ll catch it, and that needs to be okay.
It is a luxury – not a badge of honor – to stay home more than usual. It is a luxury – not a badge of honor – to sit on a mountainous pile of Binax and use them with every sniffle. Decisions that seem like choices for the privileged are still not choices for most. Regardless, that level of vigilance shouldn’t be placed on anyone in our society, whether they have the means to execute on it or not. Especially now.
Let’s play this out at school. When a classmate of your child’s tests positive in the next few weeks, leave it be. Your child has been exposed. You learn that the dad had a scratchy throat but never tested himself before sending the child to school? Leave him alone. Spare me the notion that you’ve kept your child home from school any time someone in your family has had a tickle (my two-year-old daughter can’t even communicate she has a tickle). A few years ago, my older daughter got sent home with the flu. She probably contracted it at school. She probably also transmitted at school. It was no one’s fault. This now also needs to be no one’s fault.
The moral failure is not your neighbor’s. Please remember this.
If you are angry this time around, be angry, but do not direct it at the people in your proximate circles, particularly your personal communities, immediate friends, and families. Direct it larger – the lack of available testing, mask mandates, medical infrastructure, and resources to keep our children safely in school is maddening. The CDC’s ping-ponging health guidance is impossible. While there are exceptionally bad people out there who choose to make this worse (and this newsletter is not about them), many of us are just navigating the best we can.
At this rate, we are all one judgment call away from being cancelled. So let’s turn down the temperature on a highly infectious variant that seems like it doesn’t care how long you’ve been acting so responsibly. We have to presume the people we care about are doing their best, or the negativity will permanently taint our relationships. Our neutral stance needs to be giving them the benefit of the doubt. If not, what are we doing? Who will we become?
Soon, you may get COVID. You may have made sacrifices you thought would prevent this from happening. That is upsetting. I am upset. But in this new year and new phase of the pandemic, we need to move forward if we are ever going to return to a healthy way of interacting, of living, of trusting. The disease of judgment is chronic unless we treat it from the heart.
Agree? Disagree? I can take it, let’s discuss: averagejoelle3@gmail.com.
The little things
Happy New Year from The Boneparths. This card found its way to approximately half of our mailing list before the weight of the past few weeks prevented me from following up on questionable addresses. If you should have received one IRL, I’m sorry. But please consider this my reassurance that, resolutions or otherwise, it’s okay if you can’t follow through on something right now.
Also
Rest in peace, Betty White. An American treasure.
This feels like just the post I needed to read today. As a full-time traveler, I normally have full control over my decisions, letting others live without it having much impact on my health or choices. However, with the holidays, we've been spending time with our families and I know that I have been heavily judging other people's behaviors (like my brother not getting vaccinated, or my in-laws not masking). This judgment has been weighing on me and feels toxic. I want to choose to simply let others live their lives as they may and let go of the things I can't control. Like you said, most of us are doing our best. Thank you for this perspective!