One Year Later…A Beacon of Hope

16 hours and 22 minutes. That’s the length of a flight from Melbourne, Australia to LAX. It’s painfully long but once you’re past Hawaii it starts to feel like the home stretch. I’ve never minded it that much as we usually fly Qantas and they have a particularly fantastic wine selection onboard (important.)

I didn’t think much of the coronavirus when it first hit. But then again, not many of us did. Melbourne had its first Covid case in January. Amidst the bushfires and the smoke, a single case of an unknown virus didn’t seem to phase me.

I’d accepted an offer to train back into “Finding Nemo the Musical” at Walt Disney World. It was enough to get my foot back in the door and rejoin a group of humans I still call family. Moving across the world had already proven to be difficult, and in my mind, performing equals happy.

I wanted to be happy. And I figured I could just quietly slide back into the cast and nobody would even remember I’d been gone for 3 years. I wanted it to be seamless and simple. People come and go all the time at Disney. Because it’s always there.

It was a quiet evening in October. My husband was working on a puzzle and I was lying on the ground with my legs up against a wall. My doctor told me that when I start to feel anxious or faint to put my legs up a wall. Apparently it helps oxygen flow to your brain. Of course, it’s been the most stressful of years for all of us but there wasn’t anything particularly different about this evening. In fact, I barely even budged when I received the email that I was being laid off from the Walt Disney Company. Because just as the images passed through my mind of an empty Times Square or a desolate Eiffel Tower, nothing about this year could possibly be true. This isn’t real.

I think I cried? Maybe I didn’t. I can’t remember. My mind went into survival mode and I immediately started viewing this hapless situation as an opportunity. It’s a fresh start! A time to “try something else.”

But when “something else” doesn’t seem to exist, things can get a bit tricky.

A bloodbath. That’s what the news outlets were calling it. Tens of thousands of workers told that they would not be returning from furlough. I remember meeting a journalist from The Washington Post at a volunteer event and she wanted to interview me regarding the layoffs and hear my personal story.

But halfway through the interview, I heard the words coming out of my mouth and I think it really hit me. “Just moved back from Australia,” “Husband unemployed, hotel manager,” “How are we paying rent?”

I told her not to publish. She didn’t. Thanks, Kelsey.

But that’s the thing, right? Everyone has a story. This pandemic has decimated entire industries (theatre being hit the hardest, in my opinion.) Everyone has a story. How it happened, last curtain call, waking up the next morning assuming this closure would only last a few weeks. It really is wild.

They say that you grieve in stages. I think the anger stage lasted the longest for me. I was just so angry. At everything and everyone. And I am not an angry person. I refused to understand how the universe could allow me to decide to move back to the US one week before a global pandemic would unravel. Things were good in Australia. They could’ve been better. But they were good. And they were comfortable.

But I’ve never wanted comfortable. Comfortable terrifies me almost as much as the virus. I’m not wired that way.

The anger and resentment I felt regarding our move only continued to deepen as I saw how diligently Australia was containing the virus. The virus is virtually nonexistent in Australia. There will be a case or two that escape from hotel quarantine and then they lock down the entire state and contain it.

They fix the problem.

A notion that seems almost inconceivable as I sit here In the US, a country in which we’ve essentially just spent the last year killing one another. And masks? HA! I live in Florida. Good luck with that.

I constantly hear the phrase “But everyone’s going through it. Everyone is affected.” True, to some extent. But I also fundamentally (such a politician word) disagree that the same chords have been hit within each of us throughout this pandemic. Some have lost everything, others not so much. And then there are those of us in the middle just confused as all hell as to what comes next. We’re surviving, we’re keeping calm, we have not an ounce of normal and we truly just sit back and wait. We see others mourning the loss of loved ones to Covid and we see photos of friends gathering at crowded bars on a Friday night. We see it all and in a weird way, we feel it all.

Laughter helps. It truly is the best medicine.

One year later. Unemployed, anxious, annoyed and living in the country that has taken the most minimalistic approach to containing this virus. Each day feeling eerily reminiscent of the previous and solo happy hour on my balcony now fully a part of my daily routine.

With all things considered, for the first time in more than 365 days, I am hopeful.

It was a Sunday. The start of a new week. It started as I innocently (and very excitedly) watched the Harry and Meghan interview with Oprah. Hoping for an evening of gossip and gusto, what I received was an overwhelming amount of disgust with the family that I’ve admired my entire life and an even more overwhelming trigger from hearing Meghan speak of her mental health issues.

In short, I realized, I was not ok.

That’s the thing about the pandemic. We’re constantly in survival mode, and blocking out pain and sorrow can, unfortunately, be part of the process.

Hearing Meghan, uncandidly the most famous woman on the planet, speak of her struggles, flicked a switch in my brain. I knew fully that I was nowhere near the depths of her darkness (thankfully.) But hearing her speak of isolation and lack of human contact, fear of leaving her apartment in Kensington Palace, all of these things struck a chord in me and resonated deeper than I wanted to feel.

I was certainly not prepared for this. Almost annoyed. I didn’t sign up for this! I just poured a cup of tea, pinky finger raised, to hear the juicy royal gossip that I live for. I went to bed feeling seen and scared. I told my husband several days later via FaceTime audio that I felt hopeless. Nothing even close to what Meghan admitted to feeling, but hopeless. I spoke to my mom about my “failed career,” and I realized, I had to do something.

I like to make lists. I don’t always make them (I’m an Aries. I don’t have time for that) but when something is wrong and I’m trying to make it right, I’ll make a list. So, I made one. “What Would Help?” That was the title of this list. Of course, several things ended up on that list, but in the coveted number one spot, it read, “Getting Vaccinated.”

So that’s what I did.

It was 10:30 a.m. on Monday the 12th of March (exactly one year since Covid-19 was labeled “a pandemic.”) I hadn’t slept much the night before as I’d had a terrible migraine. The sun was shining and I woke around 7:30 a.m. I opened  my eyes, sat up, pulled the sheets back and said aloud, to myself, “I’m going to get vaccinated today.”

Now. I’m all about resilience, lol. All about going after what I want, doing everything in my power to receive what I truly believe I need in life. But this feat? Yeah. This wasn’t going to be easy. They weren’t on my age group, I, thankfully, do not have an underlying physical health condition, and I am not a teacher. But that didn’t stop me from driving out to the newly erected FEMA vaccination site to give it my best damn shot (every pun intended.)

I knew that this site was not going through every single one of their daily doses. I knew people that had already been vaccinated there and I knew that it was possible. It may just take a bit of…persistence.

I curled my hair, put on my vaccination approved top and drove to the site. Three women (rudely) told me “no” and that that type of thing doesn’t happen there. I told them the truth. Said that I’d love to wait standby, I’ll wait as long as necessary. After the third woman shrugged me off, I went back to my car feeling defeated.

“It’s fine. I’ll just call around to a few more grocery stores.” I sat in the car and called several with no luck of getting on any type of waiting list. They were all full. I texted my friend and told her that I was going to drive home as I didn’t have the mental capacity to deal with any of this today. And as I took my mask off, I remembered what I’d said to my husband the previous evening. “I feel hopeless.” The girl that hasn’t dined indoors since her Disney Cruise in March of 2020. The girl whose husband has been on the other side of the globe for nearly 5 months, the girl living in isolation and hasn’t let anyone into her apartment, and is now afraid to even go to the grocery store.

Nope. F this. I’m getting vaccinated today.

I put my mask back on and walked past the women that told me “no” and to the people that told me “yes.” Ten minutes later, I’d already received my first Pfizer shot and was sitting in the observation area chatting with the national guard.

And for the first time in 365 days, I can see the light. Dramatic, yes. But very, very real.

We try everything to feel better when we’re sad, right? Food, shopping, alcohol, working out, sleeping, not sleeping. Anything to take the pain away. I tried it all. Nothing was working. I guess it’s simple. There was a problem and I needed to fix it.

Buying shit off of Amazon won’t fix Covid, but a vaccine will.

It may not be a quick fix, but it was the fix I needed to demolish the demons that had been in me for nearly a year that I could.not.get.rid.of.

Are they completely gone? Of course not. They never are. I believe there is darkness and light inside of each of us. It’s how we choose to direct our energy. What kind of Carrie am I going to be today? How can I make this the best possible day and how can I keep my mind, body and soul energized, optimistic and fulfilled?

I’m not sure how we’ll all recover from this experience. If people think that the second we reach herd immunity, we’re all just going to skip back to offices, happy hours, green rooms and large gatherings, and act as if nothing happened….woof. This is going to take time. Healing. We’ll be getting reacquainted with what once was and what it now can be. It will be incredible, but it will be a healing process.

So, that’s it. The toughest year of my life and certainly the toughest year for most humans on this Earth.

But, we’re doing it, guys. That light at the end of the tunnel is shining so bright right now, it’s blinding. I couldn’t see it until recently. I really couldn’t. But the hope, excitement, comfort, cloud 9 feels, whatever you want to call it, that I’m feeling, I owe almost entirely to the scientists. The people that worked tirelessly throughout this past year to create a solution to this cataclysmic event that shook us to our core.

Christians speak of being born again and feeling as if they’ve become a new being. I can only assume that this euphoria would equate similarly. I only hope that you make the choice to join the party so that we can all end this thing together, once and for all, and get schools, theatres and small businesses open and get even the slightest bit of normality back to our lives. We’re so close. Let’s get there, together. As a nation undivided, as a world united and as the human race living empathetically to help each other.

“I don’t know how to explain to you that you should care for other people.” -Dr. Anthony Fauci

Love and light, Carrie