The root of anxiety is uncertainty: insecurity around jobs, our health and our families’ health is suddenly filling our reality with uncertainty.
The structure we created in our pre-COVID-19 lives made us feel in control and safe. However, the pandemic has brought uncertainty to the very core of our lives.
At present, there isn’t a vaccine for COVID-19. However, being aware of the cause of anxiety around this contagion will inoculate ourselves against its disquieting effects. There are a few new routines, or examples of life, we can find solace and a level of safety in.
On Wednesday March 11,in Oklahoma City, a Utah Jazz player tested positive for COVID-19. The National Basketball Association (NBA) postponed that game 35 minutes after it was scheduled to start. The next day the NBA suspended its season and there was a cascading effect through all of the sports and entertainment world.
Stunned sentiments began to filter through all our screens. The heroes we idolized pre-COVID-19 went completely silent.
We need heroes in life. It’s a part of being human to want to see the best versions of ourselves on display. We can emulate their behaviour and show our children what we can become if we train and learn with exceptional discipline.
We needed someone to fill the space in the middle of our lives, which sat empty with uncomfortable, bewildered silence.
Our nurses, doctors, all frontline health-care workers, janitors and essential workers of every uniform stepped up when we needed heroes at the most crucial moment. We needed them and they showed up with the professionalism of all the multimillion-dollar athletes and entertainers combined.
The humble, quiet, but reassuring voice of BC’s top doctor, Dr. Bonnie Henry quickly became a new routine. Her sincere tone and soft delivery of vital, and sometimes difficult to hear information was, and is, a bit of certainty at suppertime. The top doctor gives us a reassuring, authentic and caring voice like a firm hand that guides through a moonless night.
Scientists, who after a lifetime of acquiring knowledge, tirelessly focus their energies toward a vaccine. Laboratories are the new arena where real victory will be attained. Science and medicine is the closest thing to certainty we will find in this new reality.
Anxiety, individual or collective, is a reaction to immediate danger in our environment. In the fight, flight or freeze response embedded in our brains, most of us are motionless, like deer in headlights, with anxiety and fear. The professionalism and courage of our frontline and other essential people alleviates anxiety created by current circumstances.
The vaccine will be found and a resemblance of our previous normalcy in life will return, but our place in the world will never be the same.
We are indebted to the nurses, doctors and essential workers everywhere who demonstrated authentic heroism during these anxious, uncertain times. Thank you, with my heart.
Robert Skender is a Powell River freelance writer and health commentator.
