Lately, I have been super stressed about going to get a Covid booster shot; I don’t technically fall under the immune compromised category of folks currently eligible, but in light of the autoimmune blood markers I have, I worry I am at increased risk of bad Covid outcomes. When I spoke to my doctor, he agreed, and thought a booster was a good idea. Still, I feel bad going to take one, like I shouldn’t do it because not everyone is eligible, and technically, under the strictest definition of immune compromised, neither am I. I was thinking a bit about why I feel so guilty/stressed about getting a shot and it reminded me of another time I felt similarly…

At the last Katina I was at, there was bad air quality in SF due to fire. I made it to the event, but I felt like, because of my asthma, I couldn’t go early to help set up as it left me exposed to the smokey air too long. I felt bad though, like I should be helping out more, after all, other people were. I realize that when I look at both situations, I am benchmarking myself against an imagined standard of ‘normal’, what ‘those other people’ do, and assuming what applies to that imagined ‘normal’ group must also apply to me. I don’t see how we aren’t the same –how those snowflakes are shaped differently than me — how there are different causes and conditions that gave each of us our unique crystalline structure, our characteristics, our physical abilities and diseases.  I don’t see that really no one is the same, that there is no actual ‘normal’ group, that both the benchmarking and the standard to which I benchmark myself are both entirely in my head.

What is more, is that I am choosy with the way I interpret details. I look at ‘others’ and I see ‘healthy’ as normative. Of course when I see this it is me looking with half closed eyes, certain people, at certain times, not knowing their full pictures or histories. Still — healthy is what I choose as the ‘should state”. I should be that, others are. I should act that. I should live my life as though it were true, ignoring the actual differences — the diseases — at play.

The irony of course is that I am focusing on what I ‘imagine’ is similar, instead of seeing what really is the same.  What is the same is that we are all subject to disease, to illness and breaking. These circumstances — air quality to my asthma, Covid to my potential immune system issues, are just the details of ways I am subject to the common experience of breaking. Death and disease, that is snow, the specific illness, that’s just a particular snowflake’s structure.

Years ago, I complained to Mae Neecha  about hating a world that felt unstable and unpredictable. She asked me if I ever considered that the instability I hate might be part of a larger system of stability, in a world that was predictable in its way. She suggested I just didn’t see it that way because I am so focused on my rules I miss the world’s rule. As I consider snowflakes again, I am coming to understand just how right she is: There is an order to this world, there are rules that govern snow and reason’s for each individual snowflakes unique structure. I just don’t always see them, I don’t always like them and in the delta between my expectations/desires/shoulds and reality lies all my fears, anxieties and suffering.