Written by Paul Dail
I’m not allowed to read the news anymore.
Not that I consume that much to begin with. I’ve had to put myself on somewhat of a news media blackout as of late (another topic for another day). But you’d have to live in a cave to not hear anything about the Ebola virus.
According to my wife, I should probably live in a cave.
Or at least have some sort of program that filters out the word “Ebola” from any of my online activity. Because I have my own sickness. I know that now. It’s a mental one (or two, or three, more realistically), but now that I’m coming to terms with it, it’s a relief to know I’m just crazy.
I don’t think I’m alone. In a recent poll by The Independent asking, “How worried should the American public be about the Ebola virus?”, almost 12 percent responded the same way I did. Not “terrified” or “scared,” but right in the middle, with “worried.”
So here’s the catalyst for all this: First thing Monday morning, just as I turned on my computer to scan the headlines in my duties as a ghost writer for a criminal defense attorney’s blog, bam! The first headline I see reads, “SOMETHING ABOUT EBOLA AND MAYBE UTAH!”
It messed me up. Ruined what I had envisioned would be a nice, live-in-the-moment morning with my kids and carried with it little aftershocks over the next few days.
It was my wife who confirmed my insanity in her gentlest of ways. Although it wasn’t entirely a surprise. Well, maybe to her.
How am I crazy? Let me count the ways.
I have a few things working against me when it comes to news about things like Ebola:
First, I have hypochondriac tendencies and am a horror writer, two ingredients of my particular brand of crazy I have previously documented for The Independent. Combine news of a virus threatening a 70 percent mortality rate with a brain that can already create an apocalypse out of thin air—no help from reality needed, thank you very much—and you get trouble.
However, perhaps superceding those two elements of my personality is the fact that I’m an overprotective parent. This is the part of me that gets angry when people without children tell me how paranoid I am, as they brandish the slim statistical likelihood of contracting Ebola.
Unless you have kids going to daycare and preschool. I love my kids, but all children have snot, spit, vomit, poop, and blood issues at any given moment during the day. Then you put them in a room with 30 other children.
I have a, perhaps naïve, belief that were I to contract Ebola, I’d beat it. But when it comes to my kids… well, this is the part of me that wants to keep my children home from school. Not yet, mind you, but I would be one of the early ones if things started getting much worse.
So there you have it. How one headline put me into a serious funk.
I had to explain all of this to my wife at the end of the week when she asked me why I said I needed a break from watching “The Walking Dead.” (We’re a season behind the rest of the world, so this shouldn’t be a huge spoiler.) It’s the part where a virus is sweeping though their group, which of course, includes children.
Yeah, see “all of the above” crazysauce in one television show.
“It’s exhausting to live like that.”
I knew that being this preoccupied by Ebola wasn’t healthy.
I didn’t expect my wife to say she felt the same way. However, I thought she’d tell me that had she taken the poll, she would only mark one choice lower than me; she would be “concerned.” Turns out she would actually say the reason only 50 percent responded as “fearless”—that the possibility of mass outbreak was “extremely unlikely”—is because people who were tired of hearing about Ebola probably didn’t bother to take the survey.
“It’s not a great situation,” she said, “but it’s getting better. Our medical system is much more well-prepared to handle such things.”
“Yeah, but there was that nurse in Maine, and now that woman in Utah still traveling back and forth from Liberia,” I said.
“And they’ll be on top of it if she poses a threat to public safety.”
“Yeah, but-”
She put her hand on my leg, and I could see her love for me. Mostly in her concern.
“It’s exhausting to live like that,” she said.
Of course it is. I had already come to this conclusion a few hours earlier, but apparently it was still bugging me enough that not even the horror writer wanted to watch “The Walking Dead.” I guess I still needed to hear it from someone else.
Two weeks ago, I wrote about the need for reminders when it comes to my new push to be more mindful of appreciating the moment, the day-to-day, without concern for the “then” or “later.” Because it’s hard. It takes practice.
Don’t worry; even though this is my second column that mentions mindfulness, I’m not going to become “that guy.” I’ve got too many sins to be throwing many stones. But it seems to me that allowing my emotions to be run by a disaster that hasn’t even happened yet is the antithesis of appreciating life in the moment.
Maybe fear in general is on the opposite side of those scales.
While being a little “concerned” is a reasonable thing, when it comes to the “terrified,” “scared,” and “worried” group—almost one of every five people, if this poll were indicative of reality, at least as far as Ebola is concerned—we’ve got a problem.
But, hey, admitting it is the first step, right?
Life is fraught with peril from the first breath we take. Speaking of my kids, to quote a song from one of their favorite movies: “Ruffians, thugs, poison ivy, quicksand, cannibals, and snakes. The plague.”
But you can’t live for fear of dying, because then you aren’t really living. To quote another movie, based on the novella “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption” by Stephen King (yeah, a horror writer wrote that one), “Get busy living, or get busy dying.”
I just needed a reminder.
So how about you? Are you one of my brothers and sisters of the 20 percent? If not Ebola, is there something else in your life of which you’re afraid, maybe more than a little “concerned?” Something that’s imprisoning you? Keeping you from being happy or holding you back?
Were you expecting this article to have more stuff about Ebola?
Would that have made it better or worse?
As always, I would love to hear your thoughts or comments. For the first two weeks following publication of each of my columns, I will personally respond to each comment within 48 hours.
