Notes From Inside the Wall

I’d be surprised if you didn’t feel it over the past week: A sense of deep, dull despair the likes of which you swore you hadn’t quite felt this urgently over the course of the pandemic. You may have said — or heard from someone else — that you’d really hit the wall this time. You may have just felt like tearing your hair out just to feel something. 

My friend Hannah was telling me about it on Wednesday. “I have honestly lost all executive function,” she said.

“We haven’t hit the wall,” I responded, “we’ve been living inside of it like we’re the Littles.”

That saying about how it’s always darkest before the dawn is of course true, and I think that’s where most of us are at right now as we live in the space between vaccinations and a full year of whatever the hell we’ve been doing. The most excited — and the most nervous— I’ve felt in weeks was when I emailed my doctor last week to get a letter from him in preparation for the vaccination process. He wrote me back in under 45 minutes, and he did not mince words.

Ms. Sarah Flynn has been under my care for the past fifteen years. Ms. Flynn has a complex medical history that has rendered her immunocompromised with diminished pulmonary function. Diagnoses that have contributed to this condition are:

1. Granulomatosis with polyangitis (prolonged, critical illness)

2. History of cyclophosphamide exposure (treatment for above)

3. Thyroid disease

Ms. Flynn is at high risk for severe disease and death from COVID-19 and as such, it is my professional medical opinion that Ms. Flynn be scheduled for COVID-19 as soon as possible.

Not a word in that letter is untrue, and yet seeing it written out was weirdly shocking, as though perhaps I’d been kidding myself about all of it this whole time. Perhaps I’d been trapped inside a pandemic house of my own making. “He could have made me sound less frail,” I thought momentarily, before remembering that if you’re trying to get vaccinated for a globally threatening virus, you probably don’t want to mince words.

What I feel now is not yet hope, because it’s not yet real. What I feel now is the darkness before the dawn, a dull ache that never really leaves my body and a heaviness that exists in the fog of my head. It’s the middle of February, so it’s the siren song of seasonal affective disorder combined with Month Eleven — a combination that, if you think about it hard enough, makes it surprising that anyone is able to get out of bed ever.

But the days are getting longer and it’s light out now past 5PM, and at some point all this snow (if you’re anywhere but California right now, I trust you probably have snow) will melt, and we’re going to start to figure out what life looks like in a post-vaccine world. I don’t really know what that looks like for me, to be honest: I’ve cut risk-weighing out of my life pretty much entirely for the last year, and it’s going to be hard to understand how to navigate as an individual for a while. A vaccine is not a hall pass, but it is a signal of change, and for that it’s easy to be grateful.

Here is a recipe for a delicious, herby, meaty stew that will help get you through February. You should make it.

And here is a playlist I made last Valentine’s Day, before everything went to shit. It’s still good!

You’re reading “Soup and Despair,” a weekly newsletter by Sarah Flynn and Rebecca Orchant. It’s about food, feelings, and surviving the dark times. If someone forwarded you this email, it’s because they love you and they want you to eat. You can subscribe to it too!