How do we recover from feeling poorly? How does a nation recover from a pandemic? Where do we even start recovering our good nature, never mind happiness?
Last time I wrote, I was grumpily, if resignedly, under the weather from my second Moderna jab. I foresaw no particular joy in the immediate future except the headache receding. And the cats not fighting over which got to sleep on my ankles. Two of my favorite authors kept me company while I thought about feeling awful vs. feeling better. If you’re only recently vaccinated, maybe they’ll help you move past your post-shot down-cycle, too.
William Least Heat-Moon said this: “You never feel better than when you start feeling good after you’ve been feeling bad.” (Blue Highways)
John Steinbeck said this: “The sun was up when I awakened, and the world was remade and shining. There are as many worlds as there are kinds of days, and as an opal changes its colors and its fire to match the nature of a day, so do I. The night fears and loneliness were so far gone that I could hardly remember them.” (Travels With Charley)
They were both troubled by phantoms in the night, the tapping of a tree-branch on a window that might be some unsee-able horror or, just a branch in the wind. Disease is just as invisible as the nightmares these bold men conjured up in their motorized cabins. Are we more right to be afraid of scientific germs than our ancestors were of wicked demons and spirits? Steinbeck goes on: “If I knew they were there, I would have weapons against them, charms, prayers, some kind of alliance with forces equally strong but on my side.”
It’s at that point in Travels With Charley that I thought of an alliance with Dr. Anthony Fauci and dozed off, smiling.
Good strong medicine
Did you know that a warm smile may be among your strongest antidotes to fear and pain? In a timely article, published shortly before vaccination jabs were poised to become the one source of pain the whole world was willing to endure, the L. A. Times reported:
In a recently published paper, UC Irvine researchers found that simply smiling … can significantly reduce pain from needle injections. … “Which is just the idea of like fake it ‘til you make it’,” [researcher Sarah] Pressman said. “So, this idea that if you pretend like you’re feeling a certain emotion, then it should translate into feeling that to some extent. It should alter your emotion.”
“Grin and bear it” — Los Angeles Times
I was honestly elated to get that second shot. I wanted to do right by my friends and colleagues, and strangers, who had endured months of isolation and mask-wearing to keep each other safe. But you know what made the feverish, cranky, restless weekend worth it?
Mother’s Day.
Which fell upon the exact number of days, post-second-shot, when science — and whatever other Big Medicine you care to honor — would consider me “fully immunized.”
And that was my first chance since March 12, 2020, to give my dear mama a hug without imperiling her health. (Or, more honorably, without getting her caregiver cross-wise with her licensing agency.)
Once Mom recognized me — no mask! — and reached out for my hands, all was well with our little world. That one smile she gave — of recognition and delight — was worth every day of waiting and hoping.