After spending 25 months successfully avoiding Covid, last week I got it. It began the way many people seem to experience the BA.2 variant: a sore throat, progressing to a throat on fire. I woke up at 4am the night after the Boston marathon, where I’d screamed my lungs out, and thought “Maybe this is just because I was cheering so hard.” But I also had this sense of dread and remembered the scene in Contagion when Kate Winslet’s character wakes up in the middle of the night with symptoms of the deadly virus she’s studying. She’s looking in the mirror while she takes her temperature, muttering, “Please god no no no,” but she knows she has it. She knows she’s sick, and that she very well may die.
I spent the first two days of Covid feeling pretty crappy and sorry for myself, but by the third day, my prevailing emotion was relief. I know that for many people, it’s not a relief to get Covid. I am very lucky that my case was mild and that I don’t have preexisting conditions or comorbidities that make it especially dangerous for me or those I live with. And I know that this doesn’t mean I can’t get Covid again or that the threat is gone. But I still feel a slight perspective shift from the time before I got it.
I’ve built my life around avoiding Covid for the last two years. We all have. There are so many things I haven’t done, people I’ve chosen not to see even when I missed them terribly. So much time feels lost forever, swallowed up by the pandemic (do we get our last two birthdays back?). And despite it all, Covid still found its way into my body. For two years I’ve been doing this dance of both avoiding and waiting for it. And now that I’ve had it, I can exhale.
I FaceTimed with a friend while I was sick, and when I said that I’d thought I might actually avoid Covid forever, that I’d held onto the belief that I might be one of the people who never gets it, he said to me, gently, “Covid comes for us all.” I hope this isn’t true for the sake of saving so much human life. But in my case at least, maybe it was inevitable that I got Covid, because I did.
I keep thinking about a conversation I had with my dad while walking the dog more than a decade ago. He asked me if I believed there was more than one possibility for how things could work out. And I said yes, of course. I thought this was obvious. Didn’t he also believe that? And he said maybe not. He explained that there was a very compelling alternative: the theory of determinism, where, when a person makes a decision or performs an action, it’s impossible that this person could have made another decision or performed any other action.
He explained that this idea comes from physics. Think of billiard balls. If you know where everything is and how fast it’s moving, then you can also know exactly what the past and future look like. Billiard balls exist in a system subject to natural laws of physics: deterministic laws, which allow us to know the exact sequence of collisions.
I’d never heard of determinism before, and I was floored. It made so much sense. The universe is a machine. And we ourselves are machines.
This framework offers reassurance. I often let myself do this agonizing exercise of replaying my actions—what could I have done differently so X didn’t happen? If only I’d worn earring backs so I didn’t lose my favorite earring which I soldered myself. If only I’d put in a maintenance request to fix our freezer (and kept it more organized, less overflowing) so that when my sister opened the fridge door and the freezer door popped open, a bag of corn wouldn’t fall out, and she wouldn’t bend to pick it up, then stand up and bang her head on the freezer door, causing a 5-liter glass mason jar (which I used to brew kombucha in) to fall off the top of our fridge and crash into a ceramic pot that sat on the kitchen table, breaking it. If only I’d canceled plans with friends two weekends ago, I wouldn’t have gotten Covid! If only!
But according to determinism, all of that was inevitable anyway. So all the anxious agonizing, all the trying to fix it and prevent it is a waste of time. I still think our Covid policies should be geared toward the needs of high-risk populations, but the fact is that according to determinism, there may be only one outcome, only one sequence of events, and we’re living it, like it or not.
I just finished season two of Russian Doll, the supernatural dramedy starring Natasha Lyonne. She directed much of the second season, and while the first season was fun and interesting (grappling with the problem of dying repeatedly to relive the same goddamn 36th birthday party until she can find some X factor to end the loop of self destruction), the second season is nothing short of a masterpiece. I detest spoilers, and there are so many delightful, surprising layers to this show that are best viewed without hints, so I won’t go into any detail.
In broad strokes (and if you’d prefer no strokes, just skip this paragraph), the new season follows Nadia, played by Natasha Lyonne, as she takes the New York City 6 train to timelines in the past featuring her mother and grandmother. Nadia seems to think that by manipulating the past she can erase the generational trauma the women of her family have suffered and passed on to her. But through several poignant, trippy scenes that left me reeling, Nadia realizes the past cannot be changed. In a roundabout way, one character asks Nadia if she would choose to grow up differently if she could choose again, and Nadia says, she never chose that childhood the first time, but “that’s just how the story goes.”
It’s tempting, and futile, to torture ourselves with how things could have been different and how we might have prevented any series of events. But if that sequence was already set in motion, someone shot the break and hit the cue ball a long time ago, long before I was a factor. And then again, maybe I was always a factor. Even before I existed. We all were.
In a New Yorker profile of Natasha Lyonne just before Russian Doll came out, Lyonne is quoted saying,
“The bigger question I’m asking is if it’s true that we all have the ability, regarding past trauma, to reorient ourselves around it, or if in fact there is no free will, because it’s a set element of the universe, and therefore we must just radically accept the full weight of the past.”
That’s a big ask, and frankly, I don’t know if I’m up for either task: reorienting myself around the past or accepting the full weight of it. I don’t even know if I’m on board with determinism. But I do find solace in the message of Russian Doll that we only have one timeline we are given to live, and it’s the one we’re in. Despite the many discomforts of actually experiencing Covid, my last symptom seems to be the comfort in locating and recognizing myself as just one speck in this big machine: my future is laid out, even if I don’t know it yet.
It’s so deliciously religious without an ounce of spirituality. It’s a world sans workarounds or shortcuts. It’s god’s plan without god. It’s stepping into my own timeline, living my life as it unfolds, knowing the only way out is through.
Fortnightly Faves (covid edition)
The Learning Curve, a Substack I just discovered, in which Molly and Emily feature weekly essays written by women ranging in age and life experience. One of my favorites is this essay by Nabil Tueme on shame and living in a fat body after ED recovery.
This fascinating podcast episode of Sarah Marshall’s You’re Wrong About in which she and Anne Helen Petersen (Culture Study writer) talk about email!! How has it changed? How has it ruined our lives? Worth a listen, especially if you’re sick in bed with Covid.
This tweet that made me laugh.
Just discovered the band Trousdale and I’m doing that thing where I queue up the same song five times in a row. It’s giving The Staves and a hint of HAIM.
This amusing account of the unglamorous reality of #VanLife
Anne Lamott’s Operating Instructions which I realized partway through I’ve already read, but it’s so delightful I breezed right through it again. It’s such a humbling, humanizing book, Lamott’s diary of her son’s first year.
Francis Lee’s 2020 film Ammonite which I thought was exquisite. Subtle as the landscape of Lyme Regis and just as gorgeous. I read some reviews once I’d finished and saw a lot of critiques that Kate Winslet and Saoirse Ronan had no chemistry and I’m here to disagree. I thought their romance was compelling in large part because it wasn’t so obvious. Several critics said something along the lines of “It’s nothing compared to Portrait of a Lady On Fire” but they’re different movies with different textures and palettes and plots; I don’t think we need to compare them just because there’s a sapphic romance in each. I love them both, perhaps most of all because they’re aggressively queer and pass the Bechdel test with flying colors.
Thank you, Kate! So appreciate the mention. Also glad to hear you are on the mend!
First and foremost, I'm happy to see that you had a mild case, and have left it all in your rearview mirror. At the risk of (again) being assumptive, I think most people reading the opening paragraph will feel relief and empathy, whereas had you written it in the spring of 2020, it would've been a mix of terror, wide eyes, and puffed cheeks.
Earlier this week, I saw an article stating that the majority of Americans have already had COVID. I don't know if that's true, but it seems reasonable enough. For everyone else, I think it's inevitable. Thankfully, we have a lot more knowledge and weapons to fight it with.
Will we ever get those 2 years back? Nope, but it does make the coming years seem all the more precious. Every relationship sweeter. If anyone wants to see that in action, head to your nearest airport. Even the "bro hugs" are heartier and more heartfelt. It's amazing.
Determinism was a new term for me, but it explains so much. In my case, there are several very distinct actions I took that landed me where I am. It's reality, and the story has written itself. No spoilers, but so far the story is a good one. :)
P.S. I stumbled onto Staves this week, and am wondering how I made it this long without hearing them!