I am not OK.

Two years of pandemic have taken their toll on my ability to process stress. Add to that issues with family health, a toddler becoming a pre-schooler, two adult children being in the house as they navigate their way forward, and uncertainty with my wife’s work ¹–all while trying to remain steady so our church community could hold together though this ongoing nightmare–and I’m reeling ².

I am not OK.

I was managing before Omicron hit, but suddenly it feels like I’ve been transported back to March 2020–and the emotional reserves I had back at that time are no longer available. It’s rough.

And the killer of it is this, awful as this surge is, Omicron is probably a sign that the pandemic is entering its final phase. It is highly contagious and, because it infects so many people, our hospitals are filling up again. I can only imagine what trauma health care workers are going to be suffering for years because of this. But the preliminary data of it being less serious overall ³ has held up. Which means most folks will not go to the hospital or the ICU ⁴. Also, it’s wide-spread nature is helping humanity build up further immunity. Omicron is a sign that Covid is becoming endemic, and will become a manageable disease sooner rather than later.

I know all of this. It just doesn’t matter at the moment. Two years of this have left me tired. And Omicron was a punch to the jaw.

I will be OK.

I’m just not OK right now.

Why do I write this? Because I know a lot of folks who are tired and are thinking that they should be used to all this at this point. They think the anxiety they feel when getting together with family members, or the guilt they feel for avoiding friends and family who are unvaccinated, should have abated. They think they should have just gotten over the added stresses in the office, or that the push to get folks to stop working from home would have would not be so pronounced. They’re tired of sending their kids to school and having to ask how many classmates or teachers weren’t there that day. They don’t want to feel anxiety about sitting down at a coffee shop with friends, and they ache to see people in person at church. And we’re all tired of getting a cold and thinking about what that means for the people closest to us ⁵

We feel all these things and think we must be losing our minds, but we’re not ⁶.

We’re just not OK right now.

One day, we will be.

Breathe.

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1. She’s a teacher. To say I’m disgusted with a good number of parents and politicians at the moment is an understatement. ↩
2. Yup, that’s a run on sentence. It’s also as close to a rant as I’m going to get, so you’ll just have to deal with it. Besides, the sentence is a series and they don’t really count. So there. ↩
3. Apparently, the technical term is pathological. ↩
4. And the majority of those are unvaccinated. Compassion fatigue is a real thing. ↩
5. So much so that the state of Florida is making the phrase “ignorance is bliss” official policy. ↩
6. The people who have lost their minds are the ones who continue to demonstrate that if we assign proper blame this’ll all go away. Such people are sick. ↩