I sat down to write, feeling compelled to explain the soul-destroying isolation and abandonment of the past two years. Only after I started writing this did I find that I already did write about this. 10 months ago. Aside from getting that dog I mentioned (isn’t she lovely bandaid on my broken heart), things have been steadily declining.
Since I can’t even remember writing that previous isolation post, you can guess that my cognitive abilities are not at their best now. That last post was written before my not one but two separate asthma-induced ambulance trips to the ER, one of which I wasn’t conscious for due to a seizure after I stopped breathing. Trauma on trauma on trauma.
I am poorer, sicker, and under more threat than I was last year. All of these things on their own would be enough to deal with if you had a family or some sort of community. Without that kind of support, it feels like my soul is rotting away inside my body from lack of care. I wanted to write about how scary it is to be alone the way I am alone, but now that I’ve read my previous writing I am both comforted that I was able to already get some words out about it but disappointed that nothing good ever came of it.
There is no one to isolate with me. No one who will stay away from dangerous situations so they can watch a movie with me or cook a meal in my kitchen. No one to visit me, no one to visit. Since mask mandates were dropped, no one has even offered to go with me grocery shopping so I’m not alone dealing with people smoking in my face and basically attempting to kill me with their coughing, sneezing, unmasked face holes.
This isn’t the fault of the few people I know here. They do what they can for me. But have their own, less scary lives to live. I can’t expect anyone to upend their way of life to spend time with me. I am a newcomer, an unknown, someone who was never given the chance to bond with anyone before being thrown into the isolation oubliette. As much as being here in France is a blessing from my previous situation in the states, as the pandemic goes on, the situation becomes less and less tenable.
I have no home to go back to, and I have no place to look forward to. And if I were even half of what I was when I wrote that last post, I would have something funny to say. I would be able to creatively voice my anger instead of finding it difficult to write so much as an emoji. I’ve gone back and read more of what I wrote last year. And it’s clear that whatever part of my brain that lets me put words together is not currently running at full capacity. It hasn’t been for a while and I don’t know what concoction of isolation/ill health/poor people problems has caused it.
Declining health, declining financial support, declining opportunities, declining mobility, declining ability to see a way out. Writing is how I sort my thoughts, and it’s how as I’m writing this, I realize that the reason I am likely so drained of mental capacity is my constant state of vigilance. Hyper-vigilance as a result from child abuse, hyper-vigilance as a result of the death of my only family, the hyper-vigilance as a result of a harassment campaign that included death threats mailed to my home and forced me to flee the country, the hyper-vigilance of Covid-19 — and now I realize that since the seizure, my current exhaustion is coming from new levels of hyper-vigilance. What if I can’t make it to my phone during the next attack or can’t get a signal or the person I need for help is sleeping or busy doing all the things non-sick people are out doing? What if the ambulance doesn’t get to me in time? What if I get Covid in that wretched, no-mask hospital? What if the people tasked with answering my texts and translating doctors (who I can’t get help from because they are too busy with Covid) get tired of me or move away? What if I am forced back to the US where I will be homeless?
I am sucking on a nebulizer every hour. Every few minutes I am evaluating my breath. I fear every time I have to sweep the floor or carry the dog upstairs for a bath, because it’s so taxing on my lungs and could trigger an attack. I got a smart watch thingy that monitors O2 levels, except after a week it was causing a severe rash because the metal backing that needs to be in contact with your skin isn’t medical grade and thus has nickel in it, which I am allergic to. And I have to keep living like this. Alone. Indefinitely. Never able to relax. Waking up in the middle of the night struggling to breath terrified that this will be the one that gets me, or terrified to go to sleep in the first place for fear I will stop breathing in my sleep.
(I’m also in constant chronic pain, but that won’t kill me in the immediate so it’s silly to complain I suppose.)
And never mind there are huge aspects of isolation (FINANCIAL) that I don’t even now dare talk about, because that makes people uncomfortable and power dynamics being what they are I can’t risk making people with money feel too bad or take it too personally in the hopes that they will deign to bless me with their pocket change if I can somehow create a dopamine hit for them.
Usually by now I’d have connected some grander theme, or some running joke, or some turn of phrase we can go to to feel something from these uncreative confessions other than desperation or pity or revolution or whatever it is you feel when you listen to the poor disableds. I’m sorry I cannot provide witty commentary over my own spiraling inner dialogue of existential and social crisis wondering how closely you can compare lack of funds to lack of O2 and then remembered I am still asking for help getting decent masks so there’s definitely something there but I don’t have the energy to work it out.
The isolation is the only thing keeping me alive, but it is maybe also actually, really for real, killing me.
