I Didn’t Sign Up For This

I Didn’t Sign Up For This
Living With Covid-19 – A Journal

Prologue

The species will continue, whatever apocalypse we manage to unleash. It just won’t be much fun to live through.

Naomi Alderman

For the first time in my life, our planet has suddenly become “us” versus “it.” The Covid-19 virus, a microscopic piece of R.N.A. is turning life as we knew it upside down, inside out, and to hell for some.

I don’t care where you live on this planet, your life has changed due to Covid-19. If it hasn’t yet, it will. 

Every instinct I have tells me to lock myself in my home, and not go outside my own property boundaries for, oh, I don’t know, the next eighteen months or so. 

Except I can’t do that. I work in the health care industry as a direct care professional. I work in a group home for individuals with disabilities. My clients require around-the-clock help with meals, medications, personal hygiene, house-keeping, and personal cares. They don’t understand why their staff are so on edge. Or why we’re taking their temperatures all the time? Or why they can’t leave the house anymore? 

Never have I felt so conflicted. The selfish part of me wants me to forget it. Stay home. Get another job. One day. When and if we survive this Apocalypse. Another part of me will set the alarm for 6 am and go to work in the morning. 

If you’re not scared by this, I don’t know what to say. I know I am. But I feel justified in those feelings. We have a right to be scared. A tiny piece of R.N.A, is destroying life as we know it. 

I love to write. I want to write about this life-changing planet-changing situation we find ourselves in. This book is for me. It’s for my children and grandchildren, and for yours too. I hope to post a chapter every day. I want a record of what this was like. My own personal record. Life has never in my nearly sixty years been like this. It may never be again. They warned us for years this not only could, but would happen. We didn’t listen. Maybe if we write it all down, we will remember the lessons, and pass them along to the future generations of humanity. 

All human beings on this planet are fighting an unseen enemy. Lesson number one. Don’t all those wars and fights seem so silly now?

It’s time we became “We the people of Planet Earth.”