Day 16: Facing it All Alone
Day 16: April 11, 2020
Global cases: 1,779,842; Deaths: 108,779
Egypt cases: 1,939; Deaths: 146
Aya Sharkawy
Anthropology Alumna
“How are you doing?”
It shouldn’t be surprising that I find myself writing this. I’ve barely started and I’m getting really emotional. My eyes are welling up because I think that I haven’t really thought about this quarantine long enough to honestly answer the question of how I’m doing.
I want to be mindful, I don’t want to miss out on life because I’m not paying attention. I don’t want to become numb but I know now, because I’ve learned the hard way that numbness creeps up on me and steals feelings away in the name of protecting me from pain or sadness or exhaustion.
If I’m being mindful of how I’m feeling right now, I’d have to say that I’m feeling scared. I think we all are. I’m not so much afraid of the end of the world as I am afraid of facing it alone. And I feel alone.
Which brings me to isolation, social distancing, self-quarantine, staying at home for prolonged periods of time, safety and security. I’ve found my mind in some dark places these past few days almost as if it’s going there out of habit. Like it’s been triggered.
I’ve been through this before. I spent most of 2015 alone, in lockdown. We used words like quarantine at the time, back then I was the virus, the bad thing. I think the desired effect was supposed to be healing, it wasn’t. I can’t remember much but I do know that the person who eventually came out of that experience was a person who had survived something, who had lost something. I was tired and broken and docile. It took a lot to become strong again, I mostly have my friends to thank for that. I’m scared of being that person again.
For The Caravan‘s previous diary entries in Arabic and English go to our COVID-19 Special Coverage page.
I also had a completely new life once I was out, filled with new people, and so much to do and learn. In a way I was so distracted that I never got around to actually excavating and examining the harm done in that year, and eventually it was so far away that it felt like an irrelevant blip in my past.
Which brings me back to now. 2020. Five years later, the outbreak of the COVID-19 virus.
And I feel panic that has less to do with a sickness that might cripple my lungs or hurt the people I love, and more to do with a sickness that has been festering under layers of gauze and time – a wound that I forgot even hurt, one that’s so painful to look at that I can barely recall individual days or even months in 2015, only feelings or places, and all at once as if it happened in a week.
When I think of that time I feel a lot of anger, mostly towards the people that put me there. I understand their reasons and when I don’t think about it too much I think that I’ve forgiven them. Whether that’s true or not I don’t know for sure.
I also feel pain, grieving, for the parts of me that died that year, that didn’t make it out with the rest of me.
The strangest most eerie feelings though, are when I miss it. At times I feel a strange sort of longing for those memories that are just out of reach. Where did they go? I miss solitude, I’m scared.
I’m feeling panic because I feel trapped – like everyone else must feel – but I also feel panic because I feel trapped again.
It’s the ‘again’, the familiarity, that’s really messing with me. I’d rather face the end of the world than than be alone again.
