I’m continuing my COVID supplement to The Book of Waking Up. If you’d like to support this project, signup for my Substack. Special thanks today to PokeyDenver who signed up as a $7 monthly subscriber!

5. Pandemic Alex

Alex is a therapist, a pastor, a faith leader, a man, a woman, a collection of pronouns. Alex is an amalgam of friends spread across the country, each serving on the frontlines of the New Demon’s more nuanced war—the war of the head, heart, and soul.

“There is a collective weight sinking in,” Alex says. “Take anxiety, depression, a bad marriage, suicidal ideation, and then hop it up on social isolation, quarantine orders, and job insecurity. Know what happens?”

The question is rhetorical. Human enough, I know the answer.

The Alexes share the weight of their clients, their congregants, their friends, and as they do, I sense the heaviness pulling them down. Damn-near to the bottom. The pandemic has brought more than physical disease. The pandemic has slung a psychological and spiritual tar across the country. The frontline workers know this full well.

Addiction is up, they say. Anything to stop the pain, they say. But it’s not just the addiction of their clients. Their old cravings are coming back too. The thirsts, the desires, the needs. They are, after all, only human.

6. Resurrecting Problems

Human—if you’re reading this, you’re likely made of the same DNA-stuff I am. (I’ll hold to that slim hope that one of you is alien.) And human as you are, you might identify with the Alexes or their clients and parishioners. The weight of the pandemic now settling across your shoulders, you wonder how to stay afloat. You curse the old habits, coping mechanisms, and addictions that have come back seven times stronger.

Why the resurrection of the porn problem?

Why the rebirth of alcohol dependency?

Why the constant consumption of media?

Why do you find yourself in the pantry at 10:00 sneaking bread or cereal or any comforting thing? (This is, perhaps, an embedded confession.)

Why the return to the thing we know cannot make the pain stop?

The New Demon has come, and she’s showed us true vulnerability, the inability to be anything other than what we are--frail, addicted, asleep. But for all this waxing eloquent the resurrection of addiction in the pandemic age, does the data support a rise in addictive behavior after only a few weeks?

Let’s find out.

To Be Continued…

Join me tomorrow (and for the foreseeable future) as I continue my Pandemic Supplement to The Book of Waking Up. And if you haven’t grabbed a copy of The Book of Waking Up: Experiencing the Divine Love that Reorders a Life, grab a copy. And yes, Amazon has slowed down book shipments, so considering purchasing it from Bookish, Fort Smith or grabbing a digital copy for Kindle or Nook.