March 2020: When the Air Turned Against Me

A Question on Fear

What has been or is your greatest fear in life? I invite you to take a moment to really think about it.

Spiders? Snakes? Heights?

When I asked a male friend of a friend this question, he paused and then blurted out, “Going to prison!” (I’ll save the story of a revelation that came to me and a conversation that blossomed from his response for another blog post).

Back to my original question though. Most people have carried a fear of something in their lifetime. My greatest fear wasn’t as specific as avoiding an insect or reptile, but it was as overwhelming even at the idea of having contact. My fear was germs. Not in the “I don’t want to get sick” kind of way, but something much more deeply ingrained. It was something that ruled my life.

As we enter the third month of 2025, I would like to take this time to reflect on the anniversary of Covid-19. The year, in my already mentally ill mind, it seemed that The Air Turned Against Me. That was the year I faced one of my most irrational fears head-on. It was no longer something I could control or manage. If I’m honest, I never was controlling or managing my fears centered around germs. Covid just shed a brighter light on my obsessive thoughts and actions. It wasn’t just a fear. It was an obsession that cost me relationships, jobs, and peace of mind, all while keeping me trapped in a cycle of scanning the world for contamination.

Again, back to the original question. What is your greatest fear? Spiders, snakes, or heights? With whatever comes to mind, imagine waking up to a world where your worst fear is everywhere. If you said spiders, imagine you get out of bed, look out the window and they’re covering everything you see. If you said snakes, same scenario. They are everywhere. If you said heights, you wake up at the top of the Empire State Building. If you are like my friend who said he feared prison. You go to bed and wake up incarcerated. 

That’s how Covid felt to me. I’d gone to bed and woke up to all hell breaking loose. I can’t even try to make it sound politically correct, professional, or poetic. When I tell you that COVID 19 had me messed up in all of life’s entirety. I still have moments that I can’t believe I lived through that event. 

This is a very strong statement, but hear me when I say: because of my mental state (having already struggled with an irrational fear of germs) prior to Covid, the work I’d done in therapy to move beyond suicidal ideations became a key stepping stone. Instead of falling back into old patterns of numbing, I had healthier practices in place that allowed me to recognize my own resilience and will to live. 

The Fear Before the Pandemic

For as long as I can remember, I was a bit obsessive about cleanliness and concern of contamination, especially when it came to food. It wasn’t so much about being “crazy” about germs, but more about keeping my food and space to myself. Communal eating? Hell. To. The. No. 

I can still remember walking out of a job when a co-worker took my food out of the microwave, to check the temperature with her finger. MY FOOD. Mind you, I’m also in therapy learning to respond and not react in stressful situations. In my mind, I went WWF Frog Splash on her, followed up by a German Suplex. In reality, I just left. Walked right out the door and went home never to return. My boss called and called. I never went back. Still a reaction, but not one that would land me in jail. 

I was probably in my late twenties, possibly early thirties when I started experiencing anxiety around being in enclosed spaces where I could breathe in other people’s air, especially elevators. If someone else’s perfume or cologne lingered, it would send me into a panic attack. The wild thing is, there didn’t even need to be a person in the elevator. Just the residual scent left behind would cause me to do what we call in the military as an immediate “about face”. 15 floors? I‘ll take my chance with the stairs. Kept me in shape though, right?

The Moment It All Came True

In December 2019, I was on a cruise with a friend. I kept telling him that that staff was being weird about hand sanitizer. He said that they weren’t. When I tell you, up to that point, I’d never observed staff members in a public setting offering hand sanitizer. Every entryway that we went into, there they were. Staff members standing on either side of the door entryway offering a pump of hand sanitizer to guests. And I’m the one that’s crazy? Going back to a statement that my therapist said, “Just because your mentally ill mind existed, doesn’t mean your wise mind didn’t.” Let’s fast forward to March of 2020. There have now been whispers of Covid 19, but it’s all been pretty far away from us. How quickly that reality came to a squeaky halt. 

I’ll never forget the moment I first heard about Covid. I was nannying at the time, picking up their daughter from school. I wasn’t someone who watched the news or really much TV in general. She gets in the car, we have our normal conversation, getting caught up about her day at school. All of a sudden she says, “Someone in Georgia has The Ca-rona-vi-russ and they can’t leave their house.” I paused for a moment trying to process what she was saying.

When I finally got my thoughts together my response to this 9-year–old child was, “Hey, that is not funny. I am going to ask your parents.” She said, “Because you don’t believe me. I heard it on my mom's radio. It’s the Bert Show.” She continues to casually talk, as she should be able to. However, oblivious to the weight of what she’s sharing. Internally. I. Was. Freaking. Out.

The Internal Spiral

As soon as Covid started spreading, I mentally locked myself in a spiral of fear and physically isolated myself from friends and family that were not in, what I will now call my “Covid Bubble.” The media coverage made it worse. I could not stop watching the news. It fed the irrational ruminating spiral of fear. I was consumed by the growing sense of panic that could visibly be seen in other people as well. My greatest fear had become real, and I was also scared I might be an asymptomatic carrier. I was terrified to visit my much-older parents, convinced that I could pass the virus to them and kill them. I was consumed with “what-ifs”.

For months, I avoided the grocery store altogether. I switched to delivery. Upon delivery I took extreme measures, wiping everything down with bleach. I wore a mask everywhere, even before it was mandatory. 

3 years later, I finally caught Covid. I have to share that I initially panicked, but then an indescribable calm came over me. Almost as if my wise mind got into the driver's seat of my being. Reminding me that stressing my body out weakens my immune system. Reminding me to tap into the self-care tools that I’d been equipped with leading up to this point. Telling me to implement those tools into a rotation. Guiding me to trust that my body has the ability to heal itself. So, that is exactly what I did. 

I’ve had the flu a couple of times in my life. When I tell you, that I’ve never had symptoms like these with any illness during my time here on Earth. Ugh. It was pretty bad. I’d lost my sense of smell and taste, which was the reason I tested myself. Oddly I had an aversion to hot (temperature) food. My eye sensitivity was indescribable. The other thing that I thought was strange was I couldn’t stop moving my legs when I lay in the bed. As physically horrible as I felt, I pushed myself out of bed early every morning over those next several days. Until I felt better, I made a rotation of drinking lemon water, sun bathing, meditating, and stretching my body with a gentle yoga flow.

My sense of smell and taste were restored after about a week. I could only eat cold food for over a month. I tested positive for almost a month, which I struggled with, because if you remember, the quarantine CDC recommendations were continuously changing. The other thing that was restored after facing my fear was my child-like sense of peace. 

Shortly after catching Covid, I loosened my attachment to wearing a mask and wasn’t avoidant of being in enclosed spaces with other people moving forward. HOWEVER. I will say, I still don’t like breathing in other people’s fragrances in elevators. It’s like a WWE choke hold. (That topic and its connection to not my PTSD, but my neurodivergence will be saved yet again, in a later post).

Painting Through It

When I first began therapy after my suicide attempt. A key statement that my therapist made in one of my early appointments, was “…this is going to be a gradual process of out with the old and in with the new.” Essentially trading my coping mechanisms, as a means of numbing, with intentional practices as a guide to help learn to better process unresolved emotions. 

Before all of the chaos, I’d already experienced solace in painting. I learned that if I pushed myself to do it, no matter what I had going on, it had a way of calming my “inner chatter”; that was the common culprit of my ruminating which was a key ingredient to my depressive and anxious spirals. 

During the chaos, chaos being Covid, I found a new solace in gardening. Art became my way of processing what was happening to me —physically, emotionally, and mentally. It was an old friend, an escape, a way to externalize my fears and confusing thoughts that I couldn’t find words for. At a time when I felt out of control, painting (a childhood hobby) was one of the few ways I could feel like I was regaining some agency.

I’d been artistic in some form most of my life, but this period took my hobby to a different level. There was so much outside political fighting around Covid. In some way, it felt like I was being psychologically suffocated, because of my own struggle with fearing germs and air contamination. I used art to channel my stress, calm my inner chatter, and to give myself space to breathe. In a world full of chaos, it became my lifeline.

Making Peace

It didn’t happen all at once. There was no defining moment where I suddenly felt healed or free from fear. But slowly, quietly, something started to shift. My nervous system, which had been on high alert for years, began to soften. Not because the fear disappeared, but because I was finally learning how to live with it instead of against it.

Therapy gave me the tools. Solitude gave me space. Art gave me a voice. Gardening quieted my anxious mind. These were the steady rituals that slowly rooted me back into myself, like light from the rising sun gradually filling a room. And then one day, I realized I wasn’t living reactively anymore. I was just… living.

When I look back now, I don’t see a battle won. I see a relationship transformed. The fear is still there, sure. But it no longer steers the ship. I’ve learned how to sit beside it, breathe through it, and keep going anyway.

In Closing

The fear didn’t vanish. But it softened. It stopped dictating the rhythm of my days. And in that softening, I began to return to myself.

When the air once felt like it was turning against me, I learned to embrace it as a cool breeze on a hot day—refreshing, cleansing, and full of possibility. Not because the world is fixed, but because I’m no longer waiting for the storm to pass to live. I’m learning to welcome the breeze and every raindrop until it passes, reminding myself that all life experiences, like nature, are temporary. This mantra guides me forward.

Reflecting on my Journey

If you’re on your own journey of transformation, I invite you to reflect on what practices help you soften the edges of fear. What tools, spaces, or rituals have brought you closer to yourself? Share your thoughts with me in the comments or reach out through my blog. We’re all in this together, and sometimes the smallest shifts can make the biggest difference. Let’s continue the conversation—together we can learn to embrace our fears.