I'd Like to Keep Blaming the Pandemic, Please

 

A few weeks ago, I posted a tweet I liked on my theater's Facebook page (www.Facebook.com/EpicTheatreCo). It was about how certain people were going to be sad when the pandemic was over because they're really good at following the rules. Obviously, I didn't expect everybody to find that funny, but the tweet was verbalizing something I think we all kind of know, but feel too worried to say--

Some of us have enjoyed certain parts of having everything shut down.

For me, it's not about following the rules. It's the fact that I suffer from crippling FOMO on a daily basis, and it's impossible to feel like you're missing out when there isn't anything to miss out on. Conversely, I have one of those highly enjoyable personalities where I don't actually want to do things, but I don't want to miss anything either, and it turns out a global pandemic is the perfect way to balance out those two things.

Before I go any further, let me just say that I would, in no way, want a crisis that's taken an unimaginable amount of life and impacted people's livelihoods to go on for one second longer than it needs to, but there's a part of post-pandemic life that I don't think any of us have considered, and it seems like it might closely resemble parenthood.

I'll explain.

A few years ago, a girlfriend of mine had a baby. When the baby was old enough, her husband encourage her to go out with her friends for the evening while he watched their child, because neither one of them had gotten much social time with anyone for months. The night of the get-together, my friend found herself in that space many of us were familiar with when you've made plans in advance and then arrived at the day of only to find that you're more tired than you thought and the shower is so far away.

Then it occurred to her--

I have a kid now. I have a built-in excuse to get out of...anything.

All she'd have to do is say her child wasn't feeling that well or that she hadn't slept or anything along those lines, and surely her friends would understand, and she could stay home.

Instead, she forced herself off the couch and into the shower and went out and had a great time.

When she told me about all this, I told her that nobody would have blamed her if she decided to take a pass on the evening.

"But that's just it," she said, "It would become too tempting to do that all the time. If I become the kind of person who bails on things because I have this perfect excuse, I'm worried I'll do it all the time."

I thought about what she said recently when something I'd committed to a few weeks ago came due, and I felt the urge to back out. Not out of anxiety or depression or any of the legitimate reasons one would have for needing to break a commitment, but just because...I didn't feel like it.

As I was texting the person to cancel, I remembered that in two weeks, I will be fully vaccinated, and while that doesn't mean the end of a pandemic or the ongoing trauma we'll all be recovering from, it will mean that an active excuse for needing to change or abandon plans will become a passive one, and over time, it will lose its effectiveness, and I'll need to come up with some other reason if I want to flake.

It's true that some people can flake and not feel bad about it at all. We've almost managed to categorize flaking as a mental health tactic. That backing out of something is not only understandable but responsible if whatever it is you signed up for is causing you too much stress. But even before the pandemic began, I was beginning to worry about how flaking had almost become a culture in and of itself. There were jokes about it all over Twitter. For a country that was soon going to resist forced isolation, we sure were enjoying it before it was mandatory.

One of the post-pandemic resolutions I decided to make was to honor commitments and only flake if absolutely necessary. I started practicing at the beginning of the year, and what I soon discovered was, when you become a person who doesn't flake, people who do flake bother you a thousand times more, and, like redheads and Capricorns, I am very good at identifying other flakes, because those are the people I used to love befriending in the before times. It was comforting to know that I could flake on someone without them getting mad, because they probably wanted to do the same to me.

That's why once the pandemic struck, and people started bailing just by using the "P" word or using the go-to "With everything going on" I bristled a bit. Because, everybody, I know who among you was flaking pre-pandemic, and, frankly, while I am guilty of this as well, using a tragedy to cover for a personality trait that you had before the tragedy even began is....gross.

I'm sorry, but there's no other word for it.

It's gross.

And I am equally gross. I am no less gross than anyone else.

But as someone who vividly remembers what happens when a national tragedy can become a Get Out of Jail free card to do things like avoid a dinner at Chili's or invade Iraq, I'm worried about how people will find ways to use the pandemic and its aftermath (if we ever even get to the aftermath phase) in everyday life.

I do think there's something valuable in honoring your word, and I think it's a value we not only lost, but started to create a revisionist history around. This idea that any kind of commitment is ultimately unhealthy and unnecessary, and life should just happen organically wherein you stumble into restaurants and maybe your friends are there, and maybe they're not, and it's like living in Robert Altman's Nashville except without as much cross-talk because we're all looking at our phones the entire time.

While running some of this by a fellow flake, they told me they thought I shouldn't write about any of this.

"After the pandemic, we need to give each other a lot of grace," they said, "We need to understand that people are still going to have a hard time socializing and while they might want to--"

That was when I stopped listening, because my attention span is now the length of your average TikTok.

But my friend has a point. We should cut each other some slack.

The trouble is, every relationship is a two-way street. Friends, family, co-workers, people we think are friends, but are really just people we follow on Twitter who have no idea we exist.

(Okay, that's more one-way, I guess, sort of, but Laura Benanti liked one of my tweets, so--)

When we cancel on someone who really did want to see us, and who really did plan around us, and really did think we were going to show up, flaking on them isn't only something that affects us. And so while they might choose to show us grace in that moment, we're not showing it to them. Worst case scenario, they start to think less of honoring commitments too, and flake begets flake. A world where people don't see plans made or promises kept as being essential is not my idea of that post-pandemic Paradise we're all hoping for, even if I can go to a Nick Jonas concert and pretend I'm just chaperoning my imaginary teenage twin gay nephews.

If the pandemic has taught us one thing, it's that we should have elected Dolly Parton to lead the world a long time ago, but if it taught us two things, it's that none of us exist in a vacuum, and a lot of us wish we did.

The fact that everything we do affects someone else and the resistance to that idea is the reason we're still in this pandemic, but if it becomes something we can embrace moving forward, that's one way we can create the better all of us keep discussing in the comments section of a post about how we need to reform the homepage on Hulu.

It's up to each of us as individuals to hold ourselves accountable when we feel the urge to cancel, because it's true that nobody should question our mental health or what we're doing to preserve it, and yes, some people deal with that struggle on a daily basis, but some of us have good days where we still don't want to do anything, because we're just getting older, and the idea of a loud bar and ten dollar gourmet mozzarella sticks seems exhausting to us, but fine once we coerce ourselves into actually going out and asking for the fifteen dollar gourmet potstickers as well. As my therapist likes to remind me, talking yourself out of socializing when you're up for it due to lack of interest is the highway to real mental health struggle when you realize you haven't seen your friends in two months.

There's a part of us that have managed to use this collective nightmare to our advantage, because that's what we do. We're Americans. Give us unfathomable grief and we'll give you a hot take, an essay, and a lemonade stand. In the midst of a disaster, you could argue that it's okay to find ways to make the flood work on your behalf if it helps you keep yourself afloat, but we have to start moving away from that now.

"Pandemic" cannot become the buzzword we use to be our worst selves when this is over when it's already brought out the worst of so many of us while it was ongoing. There are things we've learned about ourselves and the world we live in that are either impossible to fix or require the kind of evolution that takes decades.

But we can all keep our word.

We can show up when we say we will.

Or we can use more self-awareness when making plans in the first place.

We can ask people to get back to us on the day of so we have a better sense of how we're feeling.

We can ask people to meet us halfway.

As long as we meet them there.

Just like we said we would.