I've been asking myself this question for a few months now... or rather from the day I landed back in America after a somewhat-amazing trip to Costa Rica. As soon as I realized a lot of my dreams have been crushed, 12 months were going to basically be down the drain for me, and so many of the things I loved were off the table, I kind of broke. I broke a little bit in March. I couldn't sleep, I couldn't think about anything other than my future. The uncertainty bodied me. I'm ashamed to say that it wrecked me.
Over the months, I've probably lost my edge against the pandemic. I've gotten tired. I've gotten bored. I've gotten annoyed. I miss my friends, I miss normalcy. I miss shaking hands with strangers, taking the train to work, being shoulder to shoulder with strangers at a bar: I miss it all. And while I've been missing normalcy, so has the rest of the world. I don't think any one person has been completely okay through all of this. In March, among the craziness, there was a short amount of time that it looked like the world was going to come together in a beautiful way to get through this pandemic. That brief moment of beauty disappeared slowly. It became a hellish year of anger. Anger from all sides. Anger from people who were taking COVID "too seriously" or "not seriously enough". Anger about politics, about the treatment of Black people in America, about the news, about what is said too often or said not enough. This is not to say that the anger isn't warranted: it's warranted more often than not. But it is tiring. So I'm not asking when the pandemic will end, when the polarization will end, when the prejudice will end. I'm asking the larger question: when will the anger end?
Have we gotten angrier these days or is it just in my mind?