After the Past Seven Weeks? It's Okay to Feel Weary.

Weary (adjective) 1. physically or mentally exhausted by hard work, exertion, strain, etc.

2. Impatient or dissatisfied with something.         –Dictonary.com

Three-hundred and thirty one episodes.

That’s how many hour long shows were created in fifteen seasons of the television procedural drama “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation”.  CSI tells the story of a group of forensic investigators who work in Las Vegas solving various and often gruesome crimes, usually murder, and yes I am totally hooked on the show. In an odd way, it brings me comfort, knowing that within sixty minutes even the most baffling of mysteries can be solved. No loose ends. No unanswered questions. Just surety, albeit fictional.

If I finally end up watching all of the episodes, every last one, it will consume 14 days of my life. And now I’m well on the way to this benchmark, for if before the COVID-19 stay at home advisory I was somewhat addicted to watching CSI on many nights after a long day at work, now I’m obsessed. 

Evening plans: make dinner. Check DVR. Watch episode I think I haven’t seen before. Realize after twenty minutes I have seen it before. Continue watching anyways. Finish show. Finish eating. Load plate and silverware into dishwasher.

Repeat.

Okay: just reading that last paragraph makes me weary, as do many other things these days, after being home—home from work, home from choir, home from the movies, home from my favorite restaurant, home from my family and friends—for 35 days, or one month and four days or 840 hours or 50,400 minutes, as of the day I write this. Not that I’m counting. Or maybe I am.

For like many of the folks I know, I am weary of this pandemic. Weary and worn out and tired.

I know I am supposed to put on a brave front and responsibly do my part without complaint and tie on a mask and slip on rubber gloves conscientiously before I enter the grocery store or pharmacy and I am doing all those things. I will continue to, definitely, but let’s tell the truth. Things are getting old now. Yes, even CSI. Sorry CSI Gil Grissom.

To be clear: I do not plan to somehow break the lock down, douse myself with Lysol and gleefully go bowling. No. My head and my heart totally get why we all need to keep on doing what we have done so far, and I think so well, in Massachusetts and much of the country, for this past month.  Give up the regularity of life so that others may live.

And I am nowhere near as hurting as so many others are now. Those who have lost a loved one to the disease, like two of my good friends who watched, powerless to do anything, as a parent succumbed to COVID-19. Another friend lost his job.  A neighbor wonders if her business will ever be able to recover.  A neighbor down the street is at the breaking point with three school age kids and a spouse all at home, cheek to jowl, pushing that clan to the breaking point. 

Even the dogs are getting sick and tired of being walked so much.

So, the inconvenience of me having to spend more time in my Lazy-Boy than I care to admit is puny compared to the struggles of the many. The discomfort I feel at not having plunged so enthusiastically into yard work or home projects, like too many of my acquaintances, is a cross I have to bear. Do you have to be so annoyingly productive? The hell that is spending hour upon hour on Facebook seeing how some have used this time to learn to paint or written a novel or run every day: what is that about!? Really?     

And so, I do claim the right to put down on the page and say out loud, that I’m weary of this worldwide dislocation, this global stoppage. You have that right too. We all do.  None of us planned for this.  Nothing could have prepared us for this.

There. I’m better.  Got it off my chest, what’s been on my heart. I pray you can too. Kvetch or complain or protest, to just one other fellow human being. Naming our collective weariness might actually give us the continued resolve to keep on keeping on.  As the old adage, goes a problem shared is a problem halved.

My next challenge? The possibility that keeps me up at night and fuels my anxiety? What if I finally run through all 331 CSI’s? Run out of Sin City capers to cheer about, when the cops win the day and Grissom declares at the end of one hour that his work is finally done?

What then!!? Suggestions for my new TV watching obsession will be gladly accepted.

Yes, we are weary. But still, we must, we will, carry on.