For the past month, I’ve been reflecting on how lucky I am that the coronavirus happened now and not five years ago or ten years ago or fifteen years ago or any other time that I’ve been alive. I am so lucky that I get to spend my time locked down with my husband and our two dogs.
During the day, I log into work. I am lucky that I get this work from home option. My husband still has to go to the office, and out of all the things that are happening right now, that seems to be the least ideal. In a perfect world, he would be home with me, safely working in the next room over. But I take comfort that he isn’t face-to-face with the general public, that he doesn’t work at a grocery store or in a fast food restaurant, serving food to dozens, hundreds of people a day through a tiny window. I am glad he comes home every night at six, like clockwork, that he isn’t a truck driving, doing long hauls across the country. I feel lucky that we have jobs and pay checks. It’s this weird feeling that I have, somewhere between extreme relief and survivor’s guilt. We are fine, healthy, stable, and others aren’t.
Sometimes, I have this thought: what if this had happened when I was in high school? I think about spending my days, locked in the house with my mom and her abusive boyfriend, no refuge of school or the public library. Even the part time job I held in the latter half my high school days would’ve likely dismissed me due to lack of business.
This abusive parent-like-person was so stereotypically sh*tty that I think you’d accuse of copying from a Lifetime movie or after school special if I described him in any detail. In a nutshell, he monitored what I ate and viciously insulted me if he saw me eat something he deemed “too fattening” while he was morbidly obese himself. He broke wooden spoons and plates if something wasn’t served to his liking even though he offered no help in grocery shopping, preparing of the meals, or cleaning up. Later in my teenage years, he sexually abused me.
When I think about spending a lockdown with this person, I have that weird feeling again, that mix between extreme relief and survivor’s guilt. Even though I had to live with my mom, who was herself complacent in the abuse, and her sh*tty boyfriend, I didn’t have to an extended period of time stuck at home with them. Not like this, at least.
Source: Reddit
