social isolation

2020 started out great. After a disappointing fall 2019 venture into being a resident full-time student at the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières where I'd spent three great summers, I was back home, subbing at school, enjoying being at school for sports and performances as well, and enjoying spending time with family and friends again. I was getting a lot out of my new UQTR all-online major program in translation and pleased to be able to keep up my education online while living back home. I was back performing music. I was planning to go back to Québec for the same summer program I'd done the past three summers. (The memories of the great summers overshadowed the disappointing fall experience.) I was even in great physical shape, eating healthy and getting lots of exercise. 2020 was shaping up to be an absolutely fantastic year.

Or so I thought.

So here we are, about a month into living in a dystopian novel with an invisible life-threatening enemy as the principal character. I need to say this before I say anything else: things with me could be a LOT worse, in that none of my family members or friends are ill or working with people who are. So for that I'm very grateful.

Now to the changes. I lost my subbing job when school closed. I've offered several times to help out at school, but they don't need me. It's very sobering after 19 years of making the school the center of my life that it is not part of my life any more. As a retiree and sub, I'm not considered a staff member so am not allowed to even set foot in the building. All my pending music performances were cancelled. I am still taking voice lessons and guitar lessons by video conference, but no ensemble work and no performances. (The voice lessons were already paid for, and my guitar teacher is in Québec and charges very little, plus the exchange rate is favorable.) I have little hope that my summer program in Québec will run, as all events in Québec have been cancelled through September and they are under extremely strict social distancing laws right now -- not guidelines, laws, with $1500 fines for violation -- and it is reported in the news when they assess those fines, so I know it's happening. (Update 4/21: the Québec summer program is now officially cancelled. I had a pretty good idea that that was coming, but I'm profoundly disappointed. )

As I write the first draft of this on a Saturday night, I am struck by the fact that I have not heard a human voice all day. Through the kitchen window I saw the next-door neighbor outside for a minute, and other than that I have not seen another person all day either. I've had a couple of exchanges with friends by text, Messenger, or e-mail. And I have a couple of socially distanced friend dates for tomorrow, a Sunday. But I do not remember one day in my entire life in which I have not heard another human voice or seen a human face all day. It's very jarring; it feels vulnerable and a little scary.

I do see friends once in a while, in pre-arranged socially distanced settings or in video chat. My brothers and I have had FaceTime dates three times -- which never happened before this. I honestly don't know what the state of my mental health would be right now if I didn't have my family and friends, even distantly and remotely. But at the end of most days I definitely feel alone and a little freaked out. It is getting better, simply because I'm getting used to that as my default state and know that I will get through it, and because I know that social isolation is protecting me.

I realize that my position is a minority position that few people can relate to: isolated alone with no useful function in society beyond obeying the guidelines so as not to get sick or make anyone else sick. I know most people have had it with constantly being with their family and are desperate for some quiet or private time. I have not been successful in making most people understand that too much alone time isn't healthy either.

Up until last week, I had hopes that school would reopen and I could get back to subbing. Now it's official that that's not going to happen. So my next logical step is to find other paid work. I had hoped to find it within the school or the school district, but that's not going to happen either. And so I prepare for yet another transition I didn't want or ask for. I have been accepted to teach on outschool.com, a sort of freelance online teaching web site. We'll see how that goes. If that's not successful, then I'll see who's hiring around here.

The authorities ask us to try not to go to the grocery store more than once every two weeks. I can't pull that off. I go once a week. Even that is a reminder of widespread fear and anxiety. I keep my mask and gloves in the car. I don't carry a purse any more and we aren't allowed to bring our own shopping bags into stores. So I keep my driver's license in the car and put my debit card in my zipped pocket. No stores take cash any more. I go to a small local grocery store, not one of the big supermarket chains, because the small one has everything I need or want. In the store, everyone is taking pains to keep six feet apart. Everyone is masked. No one speaks. People just want to get in and out. The same familiar faces as always are at the checkout behind plexiglass. Yesterday, April 17, I went to one of the big supermarkets for the first time since March 15 simply because I had some store coupons to use before they expired. It was an exercise in futility. The shelves were picked clean. That was disturbing and anxiety-producing in its own right. I understand now why hoarding happens -- I don't excuse it, and don't intend to engage in it, but I understand it. I won't go back there again for the duration.

The one good thing about my extreme-isolation day yesterday was not confronting the fear and anxiety that exist in the outside world. No mask. No avoiding other people in the store. Not that I was immune from current reality, as I regularly read six daily newspapers and one news magazine online: the Portland and Bangor papers from Maine, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and three publications in French, the daily newspapers from Montréal and Trois-Rivières and the news magazine that covers the province of Québec. So I'm well informed. This latest round of protests, egged on by the president, infuriates me to the point I have to just choose not to read that coverage. The lack of respect for and understanding of science and data appall me. Do these people seriously think that the restrictions are in place to ruin their lives? They are there to SAVE lives!! Yes, I understand the economic consequences; I lost my job too! But I'm not blaming Governor Mills for that!! In the Canadian media yesterday, the U.S. story that got the most coverage was the protest. The Canadian border has been closed since March 21 and is to remain so until May 20. The majority of Canadians appear to not want it reopened. They think we are all Trump worshippers and that they would be at risk from us.

I would be remiss if I did not more specifically acknowledge the people who are worse off than me right now. Category #1, the essential workers. One of my nephews is a paramedic. One of the nurses in the COVID-19 unit at Maine Med is one of my former students. Another former student is an ER tech at Maine Med. Another one is an intake worker at the Cumberland County Jail. Several work at supermarkets. That must be a constant source of tension. Category #2, the people who lost their jobs or livelihoods: another nephew, the owner of the small gym where I work out, the owners of the small independent bookstore I frequent, my hairstylist. They'll be a long time coming back from this. Category #3, friends with seriously ill family members whom they are not allowed to go see right now in the hospital or rehab facility. Category #4, high school and college seniors who are losing out on all their ceremonies which are an important life passage marker. My niece and yet another nephew (they are cousins, not siblings) are among those whose college year ended abruptly. My niece was a nationally ranked lacrosse player who only got a couple of games in for her senior season before it ended abruptly. Category #5, schoolteachers who are stressed and exhausted from having to immediately transition to online teaching with no warning. I have a fair amount of survivor's guilt toward that last category. A year ago that would have been me. As noted, I have tried to offer help and support. But I'm told there is nothing I can do. Category #6, people who are trying to work from home and simultaneously parent younger children, especially children who are too young to understand what's going on.

So I said all this just to document my current reality. I am o.k. The hard parts: the isolation, staving off fear and anxiety from other people (I had enough of my own at first in the face of a potentially fatal virus), the feeling like I have no more place at school after it being the center of my life for 19 years, the feeling that I'm not doing anything useful, and not knowing how I'm going to replace the lost income. What's helping: reaching out to people, video conference family and friend dates, making music and writing poetry, and staying healthy.

Let us hope that important lessons will be learned from all of this so we will never again know the worst of this: the deaths, the exhausted caregivers, the families unable to be with their elderly or ill relatives, the economic collapse, the fear, the panic. Please, let us never have to live through something like this ever again. Please let us learn from this. That's why I wrote and shared this post. I realize that it may sound whiny. But in order to learn from living like this, I don't want to forget what it felt like at its worst.

Epilogue to the Québec story

I never realized until just now that I fell off posting Québec updates on my blog. I know I notified everyone by e-mail that I came home in October and why. Very ironically since I'm writing this one month into the pandemic, my biggest motivation for coming home was social isolation. The people with whom I had hoped I would connect up there were busy with their own lives. And I didn't have a peer group up there. There were no adult students, even though I had been told that there were and that the traditional college-age students were in a minority. That wasn't my experience at all. By the second week in October there was only one class I was doing well in. So I moved out of my apartment in Trois-Rivières on Wednesday morning, October 7, and was back home in Portland that night.

My one remaining course was cancelled for the week, so I had a week at home to decide what to do. And my decision was to commute up and finish the one course I was still enrolled in. I drove up Wednesdays, stayed in the very reasonably priced Trois-Rivières Comfort Inn on Wednesday nights, had class from 8:30 - 11:30 Thursday mornings, then came home. It was very well worth it. The course was "Difficulties of French Grammar." I'd wanted to take an advanced French grammar course for a long time. And the professor, in his final year of teaching before retirement, had a reputation for being outstanding. And he was. Brilliant, witty, kind, supremely well-organized and clear. I learned so much. And he was especially generous to me and another student. She and I took it seriously. We sat in the front seats, took notes, laughed at his jokes. By the end of the semester, he had given us both several of his books from his private collection as he was cleaning out his office. I worked very hard in that course -- mind you, a course about features of French grammar that French-speaking university-level students find difficult -- and am probably prouder of getting an A in that course than anything else I've ever accomplished for myself.

My routine for October, November, and December was to sub at the school Monday and Tuesday, head up to Trois-Rivières on Wednesday, have class and come home on Thursday, and sub on Friday. Once the session was over on December 12, I settled into subbing nearly every day. I had had such a good experience in the one course I did finish that I wanted to find a way to keep it going. So I switched majors to a bachelor's degree in translation. The appeal was that the entire program is done online, that I could do it part-time, and that all students in the program pay the same tuition that the Québec residents do, or about $350 US per three-credit course. So I enrolled in two courses to start off, a French stylistics course and the required course of ... "Advanced English Grammar." Needless to say, I'm carrying an A+ in that one!

I think I prefer being in a class with the professor to learning online. But I can't deny that I'm still learning and doing it very affordably. Will I make it all the way to a degree? Hard to say. But I'm enjoying it for now and that's all that matters.

And even though my experience of living up in Trois-Rivières kind of crashed and burned because of the isolation, I don't regret one second of it. I learned a lot, I'm still learning, and am grateful that learning will continue.