How 2020 Made Me Weird(er)

So I’m vaccinated and I’m back out in public spaces, and to celebrate, I’m discovering all the ways a year of COVID life has made me weird. 

Let’s start with ordering at counters.

Surely I never liked ordering things at counters, but until March 2020, I think I was at least managing it alright. As with my boredom, I must have built up some tolerance for the pressure cooker of the food service counter over three and a half decades of COVID-free life. 

I certainly don’t remember doing what I do now, which is driving to Panera, considering going inside, and then ordering from the app in the parking lot just so I don’t have to field questions about how I’d like my sourdough sliced.

It’s not that I dislike talking to people, exactly. It’s just that I feel the need to be prepared for it. You know how before celebrities go on talk shows, they do a pre-interview? And the hosts go over the questions they’ll ask and the celebrities rehearse their responses? That’s what I would prefer for all conversations, most especially before the Qdoba team interrogates me about my bean preferences.

At the counter, there’s no time to prepare. An employee is waiting for me to make a decision, sighing heavily, perhaps. There are four hundred options for said decision and four thousand additional ways to customize those options, all organized nonsensically ten feet overhead. A line of irritated people snakes out the door behind me, some of its members clearing their throats or boring holes in the back of my head, and if I take any longer they’re all going to hate me and I’ll die alone and unloved and be buried in an unmarked grave in the Indiana countryside.

Many things collide here at the counter. The need to feel polite. My finicky food preferences. Crippling indecisiveness. And then, that most powerful, shadowy animal instinct, buried under thousands of years of human evolution in the darkest recesses of my lizard brain:

My need to be unproblematic.

What I really want to do is pause and ask what kind of cheese is in the cheese bagel. I want to pull out my glasses, take a deep breath, and read the menu with intention rather than panic. But I don’t. I feel the pressure of the bottleneck I am creating in the American capitalistic machine. I feel that I am causing other people problems, which is far worse than causing myself problems, and I blurt out whatever I got last time. Then when they ask, “Is 2% milk okay?” I entertain a brief fantasy about all the plant-based milks I would prefer to have fraternizing with my matcha powder, and I say that however it comes is perfect, thanks.

During quarantine, this problem vanished. COVID was terrible in many ways, but on the micro level of my neuroses, it allowed me to get comfortable. Real comfortable. I didn’t have to worry about inconveniencing anyone because I never interacted with anyone. Even food counters, the mildest of challenges to my hamster wheel brain, were replaced by apps that let me mull over the red onions as long as I pleased. I was never, ever problematic and so I was never, ever uncomfortable.

Which is the same as saying I was never, ever growing.

Because… you know. It’s not really about ordering at the counter. It’s about sitting with discomfort, real or imagined. It’s about being able to tolerate the possibility that someone might be less than pleased with me. It’s about being willing to look a little dumb or inexperienced or not totally in control at all times in exchange for getting what I really want, which is generally not 2% milk.

If you find all of this ludicrous, then we should be friends. I, too, find myself ludicrous, perhaps more than usual in these past few weeks, as I uncover more antisocial gems under strata of COVID coping strategies and adaptations. 

That doesn’t mean I find myself worthy of disdain, though. I have weird adaptations because we had to adapt. Our lives were upended. We did what we had to do to survive a year of social isolation, societal unrest, and constant vigilance. If that set us back a step or two on our personal growth journeys, eh. There are plenty of baristas ready to take our orders again this summer.

So please accept my permission to be a little weird at the moment. It’s okay to have to psych yourself up for things that used to be routine. Yeah, it’s silly, but it also isn’t. Our human agony will play out on stages of all sizes, from stadiums to puppet show theaters, and lucky for us, we can do the work in any of them.

If you see me standing in line this month, therefore, be warned that I shall pause for up to fifteen seconds before selecting my hot tea. I promise not to clear my throat impatiently if you do the same, and we can face the slings and arrows of getting back to normal together.