Excerpts from a Pandemic
By Leslie Ventura
A few weeks before the world entered quarantine, I was diagnosed with depression and ADHD.
I already knew about the depression—I was seeing a psychiatrist after all. But being diagnosed with depression and attention deficit disorder at the ripe age of 30 during a global pandemic?
That was a new one.
The skills I tried to implement in my life as an adult with ADHD fell by the wayside as I envisioned every single person I loved around me, and then finally, myself, falling ill to this new virus. Would I ever see my dad again? Would I be able to hug my mom? How were my aunts doing? How was I supposed to work from home and manage my ADHD?
I had just acquired the tools to help me navigate this ship, and now the vessel was seemingly headed nowhere but down.
The first few weeks were difficult, and I learned, once again, just how differently we all cope with disaster.
As I was overcome with existential dread and panic, everyone else in my circle seemed to carry on without a care in the world, at least for the time being.
Wash dishes.
Boil noodles.
Chop vegetables.
I pour oil in the pan and fry cubes of tofu or tempeh, whatever I have left in my refrigerator. I shovel the ingredients into my mouth, but I can’t taste anything.
More dishes.
Sometimes I eat leftovers, cold and bland and straight from the fridge—there’s less cleanup that way.
Each day that passes, it becomes more obvious that the notion of comfort is relative.
There’s fleeting glimpses of normalcy, of course, but they never stay too long.
Wouldn’t want to overstay their welcome, you know?
Back on my ship to nowhere, I try to gather my thoughts.
We’re all just treading water at different speeds, anyway.
Someone tells me to relax, so I stop my limbs from moving. First, my arms
Then my hands
My fingers and legs follow
I start to sink below the surface.
Is it possible to relax
Or do we just drown ourselves in these so-called comforts?
Alcohol and shopping and television
Buy more, drink more, watch more
Tethered to the weight of capitalism
We tread and tread and tread...
My father, he’s worked as a custodian in Chicago for the past 20 years—two thirds of my life. That’s 41,600 hours cleaning up the messes of other people.
“Your daughter, she speaks good English,” they chastise.
He’s a front line worker.
A “hero.”
Comfort is a phone call with him
Knowing that despite all of our differences, we have this one space
A bundle of electrical wires holding us together
we talk on his break (he works the graveyard shift) and
between mopping floors—
I lay sprawled across my bed, filling him in on the latest (it’s not much)
—and scrubbing sinks
It’s his voice when I’m anxious
that flares at the end of each syllable
A song spoken in too beautiful Spanglish
As he tries to teach me his language for the seven-hundred-and-fiftieth time
I used to hate it
But now I want to crawl inside each word
And wrap myself in the warmth of the unknown
There’s comfort there, in the outside
I’m the black sheep
But his love is kaleidoscopic
I worry about him
and my mother
Working and moving to keep this thankless and burdensome machine moving
I wish for a world more gentle and nurturing
Like my father’s phone calls.
I don’t believe in God but I’ll pray to anything so long as he doesn’t get that virus.
Time to change course again.
I’m 3,000 miles away in the middle of the desert and I’ve guzzled more cups of burnt coffee and eaten more bowls of cold soba than I can count.
I’ve actually become a pretty good cook.
It’s comforting, sometimes.
I have to write every single thing down. I mean every. single. thing.
“Shower.” “Feed the animals.” “Vacuum.”
That’s living with ADHD during a pandemic: taking inventory of my own life, one dull thing after another.
The minute I stop, it’s back to the old habits
A spiral into fear and uncertainty
Down rabbit holes and what-ifs
The ship sinks again into the abyss.
Is sneezing a symptom of COVID?
Was that a tingle in my throat?
I knew I shouldn’t have gone to the store yesterday.
Like a muscle, discipline is just conditioning. Repetition. Repetition. Repetition. How long until we’re all experts at this living in a pandemic thing?
Alarm clocks and dog walks, ravenous, searing sunshine
113 degree days and a struggling air conditioner
Rotting fruit and gnats swarming kitchen sinks.
When you realize you have no control
you find the easiest thing to control
—so I’ve started keeping a journal of all the things I eat in a day.
(There’s a lot of cheese)
I don’t know if fixating on my caloric intake is a net-positive. My guess is that it’s my meager attempt at control—control over something in this unpredictable, never-ending nightmare.
It isn’t all bad, though.
I’m also using this time to get my finances in order (and failing).
And to teach myself a new language (I gave up on Duolingo in April).
I need to escape.
To the mountains and the trees
To the unrelenting heat of the desert
To anywhere but here
and as far away from a Wi-Fi connection as possible.
For a few moments, or days, I transport to another world
My ship sails gleefully and time slows down.
I find the largest tree in the world buried in the depths of Sequoias and crank my neck all the way up.
“You must have seen so much,” I think to myself. The ambient terror of each monotonous day.
The greed and colonialism.
The bloodshed.
Why does one tree rot while others root and flourish?
Perhaps, in its perpetual stillness, it has accepted the chaos around it.
What can we learn from a 2,000 year old tree, besides resilience?
I'm still waiting for an answer.
Photos/Leslie Ventura.
Leslie Ventura is an entertainment journalist from Las Vegas, Nevada, where they are currently a staff writer at Las Vegas Weekly. Leslie received her Bachelor of Liberal Arts degree in Gender Studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and has called the desert home for the past 20 years. She has one cat, Janis, a steadily growing record collection, and a newfound appreciation for camping and the outdoors.
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