I Always Thought of Myself as a Person Who Pays Attention
A year into the pandemic, I realized I didn’t know shit
Last year at this time I knew something was coming but I didn’t know what. My boyfriend and I had a party scheduled for March 7, but we cancelled it the day before. I started wearing a mask to the grocery store, but I wasn’t super freaked out, because I had no idea what was going on. I had no idea what was going on not because the information wasn’t available, but because I wasn’t paying attention. And I was able to not pay attention precisely because I thought of myself as a person who pays attention.
On March 10, I was going over a story I had written with an editor I’d worked with before. The story had a general list of things I was freaked out about, things like climate change and right-wing violence. The editor asked if I wanted to add Covid-19 to the list, but I said I just wasn’t that worried about it. I thought to myself, God, this woman is a real hypochondriac, even though I had no evidence for this. I was seriously operating on the idea this was going to be like SARS because I knew what had happened with SARS and therefore this would be the same.
The editor asked me if I was aware of what had happened in Italy and I said no. She suggested I google it, and in a matter of seconds, I realized she…
