With the world having turned upside down for so many Americans in losing their jobs and the massive amount of uncertainty that brings, it’s a somewhat awkward feeling from where I am standing in comparison. I’m immensely lucky to have kept my employment through this COVID-19 pandemic, and the rest of my family is doing alright as well. News of millions of people filing for unemployment brings me slight pangs of unease, that I am somehow undeserving to not be amongst the unfortunate. I am not all that special, so why has the lady of luck chose me?
That sense of guilt regarding my relative prosperity during this coronavirus situation gets turn into anxiety over if and when the pendulum of hurt will swing towards me, that the wheel of fortune will surely begin a downward fall from its heights. So then I overdo and overthink it when it comes to work, on the silly belief that I have to work extra hard to be deserving of me being okay while so many others are not. That’s when I start to become careless about details, and worrying about things that I have no control over. If another team is particularly busy with tasks, I would feel bad about not contributing, even though it’s decidedly not my area of expertise and focus.
This sort of useless grasping is super tiring, and not productive at all from a work standpoint and that of mental health. But I cannot help to be sucked into that line of thought from time to time, especially when I’ve just read on the news about companies laying off employees, or State budgets getting obliterated due to the shutdown. There must be something I have to do to keep my positive situation static, so I extend myself in fretting over things I have absolutely no control over.
And that’s a fraught path to go down. The fact that I have a job that the pandemic have not adversely affected is by pure chance. I am entirely grateful for it, obviously, and the only thing I can do is to continue execute tasks at work to the best I can. It’s not helpful to feel bad about being fine during this quarantine, and that I’m greatly looking forward to the end of sheltering-in-place. I shall deal with events as they arrived, rather than being anxious about potentialities. As of right now, everything is okay.
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