A Meditation on Fear

Christina Jones

Stream of consciousness writing 

April 20, 2020

A Meditation on Fear 

Fear. Something we’re all feeling right now, something that makes each of us as individuals feel very alone, yet something that we all as a collective have in common. Isolating yet unifying? Fear. Why is it that when we are afraid, or we are anxious, we are told that everyone else is feeling this way too, as if the fact that others are curled up in little balls in their beds, sipping peppermint tea to calm the storms in their stomachs and listening to Frank Ocean on repeat out of sheer anxiety might be a point of comfort to us?

Fear as a Black person during Covid-19. Before I became sick with Covid-19 myself, I was afraid. Foolishly, I thought that my health would be fine throughout this pandemic and that, because I was doing “all the right things” to keep myself and my family healthy, I had nothing to worry about in regards to my physical health. What I was worried about for myself was having trouble with the police on my daily walks around my community. The 8:00 p.m. curfew was intimidating for me, and my mother warned me not to be out past, say, 7:45 p.m. to be safe, so as to avoid having run-ins with the police. That’s right: before I got sick, I was feeling fear on account of my blackness. I was feeling fear for fellow Black Americans who are suffering and dying from this awful virus in such appalling and disportionately high numbers. Community fear. 

The first sign that my physical health was, well, something to view with fear was that the lymph nodes in my throat swelled up. My right lymph node was so swollen that it felt like a gum ball from one of those machines that my friends and I used to put quarters into in exchange for a sweet treat after a dinner at the local pizzeria in seventh grade. I felt like asking the gum ball in my throat if it was watermelon-flavored or if it was blue raspberry. At first, I simply thought that the swelling was “strange.” After two full days of the swelling, though, I began to feel concerned. On the night before the third day, I sweat through my sheets. No. No, no, no. This is not happening. But it was happening, alright. I tried to hide my symptoms from my mother that day. Why? Out of fear. Fear that she would be upset, fear that she would be worried, fear that speaking my symptoms out loud would make them more real and therefore more threatening, and most of all, fear that I would get my mother sick. 

At a certain point, though, fear ceases to be mere, baseless worry and it becomes concrete and unignorable. I was forced to confront the reality that I was becoming very sick, very quickly. My mother saw that I was shivering so hard that my fingertips were blue and my teeth were knocking together. She heard that I could not make it through a single night without choking on my mucus, and waking up with the fear that comes from truly not being able to breathe. The fear that I felt as I got separated from my mother to get tested by humans dressed in full gear, head-to-toe, bodies hidden… the fear that I felt when my father had to physically restrain me because my body was convulsing so violently on my living room floor… the fear that I felt as I said goodbye to my parents when I arrived at the emergency room, not knowing when I would see them (or if)... the past few weeks have forced me to face the kinds of fears that seem abstract and far away when they are not suddenly one’s own. 

Each time that I hear my mother cough, my heart drops. Fear. I am absolutely terrified that she will fall victim to Covid-19. Though I know intellectually that one should never subscribe to or perpetrate narratives in which a virus is given to one person by another, or in which there is some sort of causality and guilt involved, I know as an emotional being that I would never forgive myself if after taking care of me, my mother became sick with Covid-19. I just couldn’t. Wouldn’t. One thing that I have learned in going through all of this is that fear and blame are really good friends. Mean self-talk is also in their circle. It’s been all too easy to kick myself and scold myself for not being the person that I usually am. Doing homework is unspeakably hard at this time, and it never has been for me in my life. In fact, the usual me kind of loves doing homework; now, however, I am on so much medication that I quite literally feel my vision blurring sometimes as I look at my laptop. I also miss playing the cello more than anyone except a cellist who cannot even enter the room in which their cello sits, lonely, could ever know. Fear that my heart will wither away if I do not make music. Fear that I will lose all momentum and progress after several weeks of not being able to play. Fear, fear, fear. Won’t it go away?

Fear.