Actual nightmares have become more common, ditto antidepressant and anti-anxiety med prescriptions

Mary McNamara, Tribune News Service

In the grocery store the other day, I passed through the “back to school” aisle and promptly burst into tears. Not the salty-sweet tears that fill your eyes and hang on your lashes before sending a perfect drop or two down your cheek to remind you that you are still alive in an emotional way. Nope, these were throat-spasming sobs, complete with instant mucus production and primitive guttural sounds.

It was... excessive. Especially considering how much I, into the ninth year of my third child’s education, hate back-to-school supply shopping. The possibility of not being forced by tradition into increasing our family’s already prodigious collection of erasers, coloured pencils and backpacks is one of the few benefits (besides, you know, avoiding a deadly virus) of the online schooling my eighth-grader faces.

Even so, the sight of spiral notebooks and glue sticks sent me stumbling back into the parking lot before the actual keening began.

But that’s the coronavirus blues for you: everything’s OK, you’re making a quick stop to pick up some rice cakes and — wham — you feel like Daffy Duck, accordioned to the ground by some giant anvil falling from the sky.

And then, because “Looney Tunes” torture rarely comes in one step, an outsized golf club of guilt smacks you right into the stratosphere.

“What is wrong with me?” I wondered, trying to pull myself together in the safety of my car. I still have a job and it doesn’t involve front-line involvement in the pandemic. Our family is dealing with some health issues but no one’s got COVID-19 and my kids, living under the same roof for the first time in four years, are being admirably responsible. Yes, my daughter just made the agonising decision to do her online-only first semester of her junior year at college from home and we’re all wondering how we’re going to survive eighth-grade “remote learning” when we barely survived just a few months of that in seventh.

Yes, everyone is home, pretty much all of the time for God knows how long and it turns out cabin fever is real, but at least we have a cabin. Better than a cabin, a house big enough to accommodate everyone being in separate rooms when we need to be (i.e., very often). And OK, one of the dogs has a urinary tract infection, which is not ideal; everyone is going to need new computers pretty soon, and sleep, one of the unexpected benefits of the earlier phase of the shutdown, has lately become elusive — I haven’t seen 2am this often since I got sober.

Then there’s the news. Between so many Americans’ still refusing to wear masks (or refrain from crowded parties) despite spiking death rates, the daily institutional and personal attempts to suppress protests against the rampant racism we all know exists, and a president who continues to reject science and sow division, it is often physically painful to even look at the news. Which, given my chosen profession, is a real problem.

As is my increasingly dysfunctional relationship with my various screens. We would be lost without Zoom, Slack, email, streaming platforms and all the various apps and websites that allow us to continue communing and consuming. But there is no ergonomic solution for the physical manifestations of a life spent toggling between phone, laptop, desktop and television. There is only the daily dose limit of Excedrin.

Never have I ever so longed to fling my smartphone into whatever body of water is handy, like Anne Hathaway’s character did at the end of “The Devil Wears Prada.” But should our internet connection, or heaven forbid, electricity, flicker for even a second, every door in our house flies open in instant panic and blame — and when the digital equilibrium is once again righted, we all share a moment of prayer: Dear God, let the internet and electrical grid continue to hold.

But is any of this worth crying over? In a grocery store?

Yup.

We are six months into a brutal pandemic that is killing hundreds of people on a daily basis and exposing the disparity and divisions of our country. Yes, we got off the treadmill of modern life only to find ourselves in a perpetual wash-and-rinse cycle of screens, dreams and, if we’re lucky, automobiles.