COVID - 19 and the Fearscape of my mind

This is a philosophical post. These are my thoughts at this moment about fear and COVID on a personal level.

Everything has changed so quickly. Normal and not normal seemed all switched around. My parents have been up here for almost 3 weeks. So crazy. Three weeks ago I thought I was being overly cautious telling them to wear a mask to the airport. (My parents live in Mexico and agreed to come to the States during Covid. They quarantined when they got here and are thankfully healthy.)

Now I only go to the grocery store with a mask on. What a difference. So strange. And so normal.
The fear is something new, and yet familiar. The fear of touching something or getting infected. This particular fear is new. (Having fear is old. I used to hide under the stairs to eat during school because I was so afraid of join in a table during lunchtime. I still have daily panic attacks every year for the first few months about teaching. Not fun and so predictably annoying. Especially because I actually love teaching once I'm in front of the kids!)

I’m not sure the fear does much. I mean it is my body trying to alert me to a threat. But, the fear remains long after the threat has passed. And sometimes it is like an over-reactive car alarm - blaring for no reason at all.  
It is just a feeling. Maybe I don’t have to push the feeling away and can just let myself feel worried, or anxious, or terrified, or angry. 
I just took a few minutes to let myself feel. 
It wasn’t so bad. I mean. Of course I feel sad when I think of my spouse getting sick. But I’m getting sad by imagining something that isn’t actually happening right now.

 And the specifics of what I’m imagining wouldn't even be accurate if the fear was correct. Like who knows what it would be like if he actually did get sick? I have no way of knowing the actual feeling. 

If I tried to imagine all of this ten years ago, I would have been way off base. 

 Like, if you told me that during our school caravan today I would be shouting at the top of the car and organizing the parade, while wearing a mask and signs about staying home to stay safe - I would have laughed. Even one month ago I would never have imagined this.

(Our school led a Covid Caravan. We made the cars all nice and got permission and with social distancing, we drove around honking and waving for our students. None the less, I came home feeling anxious about what if somehow one our family members got exposed to something. We had a stuffy riding on the top of the car and it fell out and then another car picked it up and they gave it back to us. I did spray it down with sanitizer later that day . . . but my mind is very skilled at using its imagination!)

So I know that I could never have imagined how this day worked out, much less how I would feel at various points along the day.

But some reason I think I know how I’ll feel if my spouse gets sick or my parents get sick or something else happens.


An intellectual understanding, however real, doesn’t help my fearscape creating mind. I don’t need a serum (like in the books Divergent) to create a fearscape. I’m perfectly capable of creating one right here right now.

But if my brain can create fear any effort on my part, then brain could create something different. Obviously it is possible. But what our mind creates isn't really under our control. 
It’s quite perplexing, the way our brain works. I mean, we can not control thoughts showing up.

(Think you can. Can you decide what your first thought is going to be when you wake up? Really? I mean how did you decide to choose THAT thought?)

But, we can direct our attention, action and behavior. Sometimes! And our thoughts are never more than a small percentage of what is really going around in our lives. Like there is what I see and smell, hear and feel, taste and think. And all of that can be focused inward on myself or outward towards the world. 
But it gets really interesting if you start thinking about how the own mind is really just interpreting light and creating these images. It doesn’t mean the world doesn’t exist. Just what we see isn't really the whole world. It is just an interpretation that the mind has created just for you.

YouYYouYYyY :)

You can’t see ultraviolet light. You can’t see atoms or waves or particles. We are seeing just one of many different ways we could experience this moment. And beyond the physical level of what we can or cannot see, there is an emotional level that impacts everything too. But that is for another day!


Nonetheless, when someone interacts with me at the store who is not wearing a mask, and isn’t giving me space, I feel big emotions. Like what if somehow, even through the mask and gloves, and disinfecting, what if I still somehow get sick.And then my brain goes into an imaginary, but very real feeling, fearscape.

What if we could accept the feeling and then move through? We could be like Trish and realize that we’ve just created a own mental simulation. And then poof. It is possible to dismiss the thought.

I'm not saying that we can dismiss reality or that we create the outside world. If we hardly have control over our own thoughts, we really can't control the outside world! If someone is sick, they are sick. I'm talking about the fear of something that has not actually happened.

It is like when you look at the ground and think you see a snake. But then you realize it is a shoelace. You can try and be afraid of it, but you know deep down that it is really just a shoelace. One you see the fearscape is imaginary, at that moment it looses it's power.

And describing it isn’t really helpful. It is not like I can read this and be like - ok, when I’m feeling like this I just need to realize that it is my mind creating this fear and bla bla bla bla bla. 
Nope. 
It is more like a description of how it works. Not a guide to how to make our brains work. That isn’t really our job. 

 (Yah! One less job description for us now.)

So even though it is not our job to control our brains, it is worth being aware when we are stuck in swirling thoughts. Then, just maybe, we can take our thoughts a little bit less seriously in those moments.

Maybe. Or maybe not. And that’s ok too. 

Thank you for reading. My hope is that you felt some sense of peace or calm while reading this. If you did, please listen to that feeling more than to my words.


If you think you know someone who would benefit from reading this, please do share.





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