The longer COVID goes on, the more perspectives I get to learn and experience. As I learn more, my opinions on how to handle it shift. A thread/

At the beginning, I saw it ONLY from my particular bubble - as a healthcare worker watching humans die left and right in agony. I saw families torn apart and nurses having panic attacks.

Later on I saw it as a student - I can’t ask questions in class when class is prerecorded. I can’t learn as well. And I learned that this is exacerbated by income level and access to internet/online education/teaching in general.

Then I saw it as an extrovert staying home constantly, battling anxiety for the first time, separated from my support network.

Then I saw it as an unemployed person, very briefly, for the month of May when the hospitals were empty and so was my paycheck as I ate into my savings.

Then I saw it as a student of virology, studying long term effects and seeing survivors debilitated. We’re still learning how survivors are left changed and not for the better.

Then I saw it as a volunteer at an increasingly crowded homeless shelter and as a friend of a frustrated, limited volunteer tutor for Brothers and Sisters who couldn’t help his kiddos who need him.

If you think the solution to this pandemic is simple, I would challenge you - have you seen multiple perspectives beyond your bubble?

Maybe it was simple but it no longer is.

The nurse in me wants everyone home but the payer of bills in me wants small business owners to keep their business. The justice in me wants people like Jeff Bezos to not profit by billions while thousands are being evicted.

Dying of suicide to loneliness, dying of COVID, and dying of starvation/exposure/etc due to homelessness are all DEATHS. And those are only deaths, there’s so much more complexity to casualties.

ALL of these things and the problems associated with each people group are real and persisting and valid and absolutely horrible.

I love & hate the idea of lockdown. I love & hate the idea of opening up. It’s bigger than me and my bias. It should be.

But not anti-masking or pro-parties. That’s not nuance, it’s stupidity.

Please get vaccinated. But also please be compassionate to others’ foreign pain.