This Is Going to Be a Weird Summer
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Summer is not my favorite time of year. I live in Florida where summer weather is the worst. It’s miserably hot, swampy, and breathing the air feels like sucking in a warm bisque. I also dislike the lack of structure and my mental health tends to take a bit of a nosedive.
Even though I don’t love having to wake up at 6:30 every morning to wrangle my children to school, I do like that it gives the day a sense of purpose.
Of course, that structure slipped away earlier than normal this year as we descended into this weird pseudo-summer. But at least during this lead up to the real thing, we had certain responsibilities to fill our time. Like attending virtual class meetings, logging into the student portal, and spending seven hours not writing one sentence. For that last one, am I talking about my kindergartner or me? You decide.
Recently, my 8-year-old asked what we were going to do this summer and I could offer little more than “we’ll figure something out.”
Because, honestly, I have absolutely no idea.
We canceled our vacation to North Carolina and our other summer mainstay, tennis camp for the oldest two kids, is out as well. Now there is little left but a seemingly endless smear of unbounded time with few, if any, natural points of delineation.
The little losses like missed birthday parties for my kids and soccer seasons cut short have been piling up, but there’s something new now that I’m starting to struggle with again. An old nemesis has returned.
The fear of missing out (or FOMO), which has hounded me most of my life but suddenly disappeared a few months ago when the world stopped, is starting to creep up on me again.
When I was in my early twenties, my social anxiety kept me from participating all that much in society. So much so that when I first heard the intro to the Green Day song “Letterbomb” in 2004 that went “Nobody likes you, everyone left you, they’re all out without you, having fun” my 23-year-old self was convinced it was written just for me.
I’m certainly no stranger to feeling like I’m missing out on things, but after a few months reprieve, it feels like I’m in a horror movie and I can sense something sinister is lurking behind me, stalking. But instead of a vicious killer, what’s following me is agitation about other people having fun.
It’s really not great. I sometimes find myself scrolling through social media and getting annoyed by people doing things I don’t think they should be doing. (Just to clarify, I wrote most of this article before the protests started, so here I’m talking about people going to crowded restaurants or vacations without masks. I fully support the protests because they are extremely necessary.)
Most of my annoyance comes from real concerns about the health and safety of friends, family, people who are particularly vulnerable to the virus, and those working on the front lines — like my wife who is a labor and delivery nurse.
I also fear the actions we are taking now will lead to prolonged agony and suffering for everyone. I would love for schools to open safely in the fall, but with every giant pool party or packed department store I see on the news that possibility seems less and less likely.
I believe I have legitimate concerns about the way people are approaching the pandemic, but the more insidious aspect of my agitation is the frustration of seeing people doing things I really want to do. I want my kids to be able to visit their grandparents the way we used to, play with friends, and go anywhere for a little while where I am not present.
I don’t want to give in and make a decision I regret for the sake of expediency or, even worse, because of FOMO, but I also worry that I might become so entrenched in my position of stasis, that I’m unwilling to ever adjust. And I don’t want to stay on the safe path for the wrong reasons.
There’s a part of me that keeps shouting, “If I give up and change, if I loosen my social distancing and quarantine procedures, I am admitting defeat.”
And while this voice isn’t completely irrational — there certainly is good reason to continue strictly adhering to best practices for the foreseeable future — it’s not telling me the whole truth. My commitment to “following the rules” isn’t because of some competitive drive to prove I was right and people I see around me living differently were wrong. At least, that’s not supposed to be the reason.
I recognize there has to come a time when my family will revert to some degree of normalcy. It’s not going to be now. It’s probably not going to be next month. It might not even be this year. But unless I’m going to wait until there is a vaccine (could be another year or more, if ever) or there are no coronavirus cases (definitely not anytime soon, Florida’s new cases are spiking right now), I will have to make decisions that are not at all obvious.
For example, if my kids’ schools do reopen in the fall or in January before there’s a vaccine, what do we do? Decisions like that seem somewhat far away now, but they’re getting closer every day.
Remember that tennis camp I mentioned earlier? The one that is the center piece of my family’s normal summers? The thing is, it’s not actually gone. I checked the county website and it’s accepting sign-ups.
Will my kids be going? Sadly, they won’t. I’m not ready to make that leap, as much as I would like to. My oldest son is prone to getting sick and sending him into a big group of kids for four hours a day just doesn’t seem wise right now. But I would be lying if I said I haven’t spent quite a few hours toying with the possibility in my head.
None of this has been easy. And it’s not getting any easier. As the “opening up” progresses, much uncertainty remains. And having to fight a very familiar foe — FOMO — only adds to the struggle.
However, when I find myself beginning to veer dangerously close to making decisions I believe are unwise, I bring myself back from the brink by remembering the grim reality of what we are facing.