A walk in the park brings tense flare-ups: Back off, you’re too close. Oh really? Then stay home. A loud neighbor, once a fleeting annoyance of urban life, is cause for complaint to the city. Wake at noon, still tired. The city’s can-do resilience has given way to resignation and random tears.
In Queens, Nicole Roderka, 28, knows she must wear a mask outside, fears the anxiety it might bring, and sets it aside. In Brooklyn, Lauren Sellers grinds her teeth at night; there are sores in her mouth from the stress. When a 3-year-old boy in Manhattan’s Inwood section, Eli McKay, looked around and declared, “The virus is gone today, we can go see my friends,” his mother replied as if from one of his picture-book fantasies: “Maybe tomorrow.”
A feeling of sadness shot through with frayed nerves could be felt in conversations in and around the city as the coronavirus outbreak in the world’s epicenter dragged toward its sixth week, its end still too far off to see.
“This is the week where I feel like I have accepted this, and given up,” Euna Chi of Brooklyn wrote in an email. “My daily commute to the couch feels ‘normal.’”
The journey that began in March with an us-against-it unity, with homemade masks and do-it-yourself haircuts and Zoom happy hours, has turned into a grim slog for many. It felt as if the city had cautiously approached a promising bend in the road, a new page on the calendar, only to find nothing, and beyond that, ever more of the same. (...)
The most recent weekly survey of 1,000 New York State residents, about half of them from the city, by the CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy asked how socially connected people have felt. Just over two in five said “not at all.” That was about double the number that answered that way four weeks earlier.
Forty percent of the latest poll’s respondents said they had felt anxious more than half of the time in the past two weeks; 32 percent said they had felt depressed.
“There is this grieving of life as we once knew it that wasn’t there before, as we try to come to terms with the new reality,” said Greg Kushnick, a psychologist in Manhattan. “I’m seeing it much more in my practice. People are really starting to get more depressed. And people who are prone to depression, it’s now kicking in.” (...)
“I think my ‘wall’ earlier this week was me finally dropping out of the ‘denial’ phase … it’s no longer ‘a fun change of pace,’” one of them, Annalisa Loeffler, wrote in an email to friends that she shared with The New York Times. “Things that are super important to me and make the rest of life bearable may not be physically possible for a very long time. I’m trying not to ‘borrow trouble,’ but there is definitely validity to accepting grief for what has been lost.”
In Queens, Nicole Roderka, 28, knows she must wear a mask outside, fears the anxiety it might bring, and sets it aside. In Brooklyn, Lauren Sellers grinds her teeth at night; there are sores in her mouth from the stress. When a 3-year-old boy in Manhattan’s Inwood section, Eli McKay, looked around and declared, “The virus is gone today, we can go see my friends,” his mother replied as if from one of his picture-book fantasies: “Maybe tomorrow.”
A feeling of sadness shot through with frayed nerves could be felt in conversations in and around the city as the coronavirus outbreak in the world’s epicenter dragged toward its sixth week, its end still too far off to see.“This is the week where I feel like I have accepted this, and given up,” Euna Chi of Brooklyn wrote in an email. “My daily commute to the couch feels ‘normal.’”
The journey that began in March with an us-against-it unity, with homemade masks and do-it-yourself haircuts and Zoom happy hours, has turned into a grim slog for many. It felt as if the city had cautiously approached a promising bend in the road, a new page on the calendar, only to find nothing, and beyond that, ever more of the same. (...)
The most recent weekly survey of 1,000 New York State residents, about half of them from the city, by the CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy asked how socially connected people have felt. Just over two in five said “not at all.” That was about double the number that answered that way four weeks earlier.
Forty percent of the latest poll’s respondents said they had felt anxious more than half of the time in the past two weeks; 32 percent said they had felt depressed.
“There is this grieving of life as we once knew it that wasn’t there before, as we try to come to terms with the new reality,” said Greg Kushnick, a psychologist in Manhattan. “I’m seeing it much more in my practice. People are really starting to get more depressed. And people who are prone to depression, it’s now kicking in.” (...)
“I think my ‘wall’ earlier this week was me finally dropping out of the ‘denial’ phase … it’s no longer ‘a fun change of pace,’” one of them, Annalisa Loeffler, wrote in an email to friends that she shared with The New York Times. “Things that are super important to me and make the rest of life bearable may not be physically possible for a very long time. I’m trying not to ‘borrow trouble,’ but there is definitely validity to accepting grief for what has been lost.”
by Michael Wilson, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Marian Carrasquero for The New York Times
[ed. I feel it too, a growing sense of resignation and defeat. The uncertainty and open-endedness of it all, a dawning realization that life as we know it will probably never be the same again. So many unresolved issues: possible mutations, a seasonal reappearance in the fall, no imminent vaccine, even the possibility that once you contract the disease you still might get reinfected. Then there's the economy, poised on a knife's edge. It's like no one will escape without some measure of personal tragedy. In the mean time we live in isolated little silos, like mole people. For a worst case scenario (as if more depressing news is needed), see: The Scariest Pandemic Timeline (The Atlantic).]
