Misery Loves Company. And That’s the Problem.

Wait. I think I’ve been here before. I know this limited feeling. I know the suspended reality of delicious, reality-erasing sleep, and the clonk over the head of the morning. Oh — things are still the same. Or, oh — things are even worse.

Anyone who’s experienced a sudden, unwelcome shift in their story knows this feeling. And, well, you might not be alive if you haven’t experienced this. A divorce, a job loss, a sick parent, a sick kid, a sick self. Some giant change that reshuffles everything you usually count on. It’s like the electricity of your life goes out, but you still go around hitting every light switch, or thinking fine, I can’t watch TV right now so I’ll do something simple like stream some music or read by a lamp. But those things were part of the electricity too. There isn’t a back up, the outage is universal, and so much of the usual good stuff is inaccessible. I mean unless you have a generator.

Part of what’s so jarring about your life going off the rails (holding aside mortal fear, etc) is the fact that it seems like everyone around you is on a train that’s running right on time. When my youngest son was diagnosed with severe epilepsy, we put a tight tourniquet around our life. We had to save what was essential so we only did essential things. We stopped traveling, we stopped going out, we stopped being last-minute-fun kinds of people. The division between the weekdays and weekends went away. TGIF seemed ridiculous because hideous things happened on a Saturday just as easily as they did on a Tuesday. We just watched life go by from our scary 24/7 vigil, sending our other kids out into the world to keep busy and simulate a carefree childhood, all the while mourning simplicity and normalcy.

But at least then the world was still out there in its reassuring way. The shows our girls were in literally went on. Baseball games got played. Playdates happened, homework got done, business travel maintained its clockwork reliability. Plus, our friends and family scaffolded around us. How could people help? Take our other kids? Sure. Bring us food? You bet. Connect us with medical experts all over the country? That also. Come just sit with us, or bring me a salad that I was always too nervously-nauseous to eat? Yes, weekly at least. We were properly rallied around, and it made the days, minutes, seconds often pass a little more easily.

So, now, here we all are in the same carpet-out-from-under-us state. Everyone’s off the rails at the same time. And this collective diagnosis calls for the rally. It’s the kind of time where we really need each other. Like after 9/11 when my husband and I went to local Bay Area restaurants for nearly every meal just to be around people, just to share our fear or catch a hint of hope. Just to feel reaffirmed by the hum of humanity. It’s the kind of time that fundamentally shifted the reputation of a whole city, when being a New Yorker was no longer shorthand for unfriendly or asshole. It suddenly meant you were nice.

So we’re all doing what we can now in the face of this profound life change, looking for the company that our misery makes feel vital: Zooming cocktail hours (and then posting pictures of our Zoom cocktail hours…), going on socially distant walks, sharing homeschooling grievances and sporadic victories via texts, reprising the old-fashioned phone call, grasping for every stitch of black humor available online, making Tiktoks. But it all falls a little…flat. There’s nothing that douses fear with hope like a real-live visit with a friend, or actually hugging your mom or dad, or forgetting your troubles over a three hour dinner with drinks, and funny people, and drinks. It’s the stuff of our life before, the stuff we can’t believe we don’t have right now. The stuff we took for granted because that’s what we do with most of the best things in our lives.

And sure, we have our families. And this is a genuine source of comfort at times. But not at ALL times in a 24/7 existence together. Because comfort can’t spring forth at all hours and not every board (bored?) game ends in hilarity. Not to mention that the state of most kitchens right now is in itself misery-invoking.

But, here’s the hopeful part: new normals hatch all the time. All of us who’ve walked on the dark side (again, basically all of us) know that we humans expand and contract and adjust and find ways. Waking up one morning some short or medium or long time after a big change somehow isn’t quite as clonking on the head. We reframe it or it shifts (like, for example, when a massive shelter in place order gets lifted!), and we return to all the stuff we took for granted with born again appreciation. Imagine the absolute luxury of just bumping into a friend, hugging and catching up, all the while a decadent 18 inches apart. I mean aren’t we all daydreaming of crowding a stage at a concert or watching a live sport with stands teeming, and sharing the immediacy of that game (versus watching a replay of, say, the 2003 College World Series as my older son did the other day — it’s new to him, he was born in 2004). Oh to be in a bustling restaurant, standing in a bar area that’s too small for its too-many patrons, waiting endlessly for a table while the host says “sorry but it’s just SO busy tonight.” That old source of annoyance will fill my soul. I mean at least the first time it happens my soul will fill; after that it could get old again. Such is a return to normalcy, such is relying on some things as givens once more, such is our same old ways.

But, maybe when this misery ends we really will love our company all the more. I, for one, am never going to cancel a fun plan to “just stay in” ever ever again. And by “ever ever” I mean for at least a month, if not two, post-lockdown. Go ahead: invite me anywhere.