Or is it just me? I got Covid and I got pretty sick. I spent 12 days with a taste in my mouth that was like I was sucking on a penny which reminded me of someone I was once friends with telling me I used to smell like a dirty penny, whatever that meant. Some people are just too clean and tidy for their own good. Shout out to Jake Gyllenhal by the way to be yet another good looking celebrity for normalizing the dirt bag behavior us common folks have been doing for years. Anyway, I could taste nothing but a dirty penny for 12 days, had a raging headache for 7 of those days, couldn’t get out of bed for the first 3, and felt nauseous after that. Yes, I’m vaccinated and yes it could have been worse. My worst nightmare is being intubated so I dodged that bullet. The day my smell came back was the day my house flooded and my rental house that is next to my house. My pool liner got seriously fucked and I was trying to save that while my brother came to tell me about the water in the basement in the garage. Did I mention this all happened at 5 PM and I had been up since 4:15 that morning? And I was leaving for a 10 hour drive to Detroit in the morning? Mind you I am not saying this for sympathy. I am merely stating the facts. If there’s one thing I’m not good at, it’s taking sympathy. I’m tough, and as much as I wanted to cry, and as much as my situation sucked, all I could think was “Fuck, I could be intubated or I could be standing in some sewage in Afghanistan trying to show my papers to a soldier.”

The one thing I had was overwhelming support from friends. You see, I’m not a big sharer. I don’t like to tell people my problems and I certainly don’t like to share too much on social media. But after a friend encouraged me to make a post about how sick I was, because he thought it would help others take the pandemic more seriously if they knew someone as healthy as I could get this sick, I decided to do it. If there’s one thing that feeds me, it’s helping others and I certainly get as much out of it and the other party involved. So I did, and I was so surprised by the support I received that it restored my faith in social media. When my house flooded and I was exhausted and all I wanted to do is cry I decided to post to social media and 4 friends came to my aid and helped me for almost 5 hours.

I’ve had a number of people check on me, worried about getting sick and then the flooding. The truth is that this year has been pretty bad for me on a number of fronts. Watching loved ones get sick and almost die. Watching those I love lose their family members. Not feeling supported by those I love and having unexpected expense after unexpected expense has caused me to seriously consider every life decision I have ever made. Like I said, I have been feeling like I’m just eating a different version of a shit sandwich each day. One say it’s shit salad on rye, the next a grilled shit sandwich, and I don’t think I need to give any more examples than that. I probably didn’t even need to give those.

I’ve been in one of those places where I have to laugh so I don’t cry. For so long I’ve given people the advice that it’s okay to not be okay but I am not okay with not being okay myself. Today I almost burst into tears about 3 or 4 times and then finally, when I came home, had a good cry. Into my pillow of course because I didn’t want my brother to hear me in the other room. Even now, as I write this, I can’t help but tear up. I am so tired of struggling. But I know I have it better than so many other people. I know that doesn’t mean that things aren’t hard. I have a high threshold for stress but damn, sometimes I wish it was lower. Not that I know what that would look like.

Edit: I wrote this post a good 4 weeks ago but never got around to posting it. Sad to say things the only things still being served in the cafeteria of life are shit sandwiches. But more on that later.