On Dogs and Pandemics

Hi there. This started as a place to share the photos I take, but it turns out I have a lot of words to say, too. This is not a surprise to anyone who has ever been on the receiving end of my text messages after 10 pm or two glasses of wine - the two circumstances under which I will share all of my feelings. I have even more words to say when there's a global pandemic and I can't do the two things that I usually do to deal with my problems: travel and take pictures.

If you don't know me or you don't know me well enough to be subjected to my unfiltered thoughts all the time, you may not know that I spent the last six months caring for my sister after she had a brain tumor removed back on Halloween. I haven't been very public about that because I never wanted her to feel like a burden or some kind of prop in my own narrative - I would do all of it a million times over if she needed me to. But as anyone who's ever cared for another person knows, it's physically and emotionally taxing and it's hard and you tend to sideline your own needs, whether you realize you're doing it or not. People don't mean to forget to check in with caregivers, but it happens, and it's incredibly isolating. In terms of loneliness, I actually felt worse during those months than I do during this period of mandated social distancing.

The way I chose to deal with that isolation was to stick myself in my Jeep or on a plane to anywhere I could find a show to shoot. In my classic self-deprecating ways, which I've since been told I need to stop because they're actually just me deflecting and avoiding processing my feelings (who knew?), I always joke that every time I get on a jet, I'm literally running away from my problems. This was and is, as I just stated, me deflecting away from the actual stress I was feeling, as if trying to make it funny would make it go away. (Spoiler alert: it did not.)

Every time I traveled, whether it was across the country or thirty minutes to work, I carried with me the crippling anxiety that something would happen to my sister while she was home alone in our apartment and that, naturally, it would be my fault because I'd left. While I was on one of those trips, I didn't hear from her until around noon, and in the space of about three hours I had fully convinced myself that a new medication had caused her to die in her sleep. In reality, said new med was just making her tired and she let herself sleep in because it was Saturday, but from 623 miles away, that was far too rational for my lizard brain. Even when I was doing everything I could to supposedly give myself a break, I was actually just feeding in to the fear that I was running away and being selfish in my actions and that it was going to cause something devastating to happen.

March 7th was the first time somebody looked me in the eye and told me that what I was doing to cope with all the heaviness wasn't selfish, a specific guilt I've been struggling with since all of this started. I was in Pittsburgh for 24 hours to photograph some friends playing a gig there and, after the venue had kicked everyone else out, I stood in the middle of the empty listening room with one of them. He's one of a handful of people with whom I've been wholly honest about the last six months and I was once again being way too open with him (it was after 10 pm, after all). I'm lucky enough to travel quite a bit, but they're usually quick weekend trips, so he asked if there was any chance I could get away for a full week in the summer to have a shot at truly clearing my head since the short trips weren't doing it. I didn't think there was, but I've spent the better part of 15 years at least making an effort to try anything he suggests, so when I finally got back to my Airbnb that night I started formulating some kind of hard reset trip for myself.

Enter: global pandemic! You know that coping mechanism you use to remove yourself from reality for a bit and try to get your head back on straight? Yeah, you can't do that anymore. Have fun sitting in your apartment with your feelings indefinitely.

I cancelled a May trip to Nashville. It's more than likely that I'll also have to cancel an August trip to North Carolina and accept that my biggest photography weekend of the year - the world's largest Irish music festival - probably won't be happening either. Speaking of photography, a friend and I were putting a show together and that's now more up in the air than I'm ready to acknowledge. I was planning to camp at the Grand Canyon in the back of my best friend's Honda Fit in October, but I'm not confident that we'll be allowed to travel across the country by then. Just as we all are, I'm watching my friends shelve their weddings and delay families meeting new babies and postpone funerals. People are dying and we can't even have fucking funerals.

This is unbelievably hard on all of us because we've never had to do it before and we don't even understand what we need in order to cope emotionally. (This was the hardest part for me, I think, of how I felt after my sister's surgery - I knew everything was wrong but I didn't know what I needed or how to ask for it.) I'm the walking definition of introvert - I actually haven't really felt lonely in quarantine, thanks to technology keeping me connected to my friends - but I'm mourning the experiences that are being cancelled and postponed indefinitely. This is another kind of guilt that I'm wrestling with, because I have friends working in grocery stores and hospitals and other essential businesses that can't close, yet I have the audacity to cry "but I want to go outside!" from the comfort of my home office where I'm still able to earn a paycheck without exposing myself or my immunocompromised sister to a deadly virus.

There are people who have it worse - way worse, infinitely and impossible-to-imaginably worse - but that doesn't negate the other grief that everyone on Earth is experiencing right now. You are allowed to be sad about a cancelled concert (I was supposed to see The Lone Bellow tonight) and fearful about your job security at the same time. I'm lucky to have mine for now, but I'm not sure how long it'll last, no matter how much reassurance we're given. You can worry for your own family's health while also fearing for the safety of healthcare workers. You can stress about all of it, but after living the last six months of my life, I also need to tell you: don't forget to take care of yourself, too. You can't take care of anyone else if you don't take care of yourself first. That's been pounded into my brain for 27 years, but it took me caring for an adult sibling to realize it's more than a phrase everyone hangs on their wall in the form of a cross-stitch hoop from Etsy.

If it's before noon, buy the stupid fancy creamer on your once a week grocery adventure and drink your coffee on your balcony. If it's after noon, drink a beer in the shower (trust me). Listen to your favorite song on repeat for 24 hours. Start the book you bought six months ago that's just collecting dust on your nightstand. Go for a walk. I've gone for so many walks now that I'm regularly hitting ten miles a day and my dog looks like he does Crossfit. Call your folks. Take a bath. Do all the cliche things that sound like they won't actually help (they will). If you need to talk to somebody and don't feel like you have anyone to reach out to, here's my email. At a bare minimum, do whatever you have to do to turn off your phone for a bit, because nobody is benefitting from a constant IV of the news right now.

One more thing: There's this gross pressure to master a skill or create something amazing during this time and, hear me out, it's bullshit. If all you do is survive this, that's enough. Things are unprecedented levels of scary and nobody should expect anyone to thrive under that. (This applies doubly to anyone who is suddenly teaching remotely or homeschooling their own kids. You didn't sign up for this and you're doing your best and that's enough, I promise.) If you also happen to accomplish something, that's excellent - but don't let that come first. I've been playing mandolin for something like ten years and I suck at it. I've been practicing every night of quarantine and I will still suck at it when this is all over. It doesn't matter. If it took my mind off of the world for a little while every night, it was a good use of time. Do the things that make you feel good, if only for a few minutes, and call that the accomplishment.

The very last part of this post has been sitting in my Notes app since at least last August. It's both completely unrelated and very related to the way I'm feeling about our world's situation right now. I've wanted to share it for quite some time, but since I already talk about my dog nonstop, it never felt like the right time to go all Suddenly Feelings™ about it.

But now is the time for Suddenly Feelings™. People are stressed and they're going to make mistakes and they're going to act out, myself included. Please be gentle on yourselves (and each other) through all of this, and please love and forgive yourself like you love and forgive your dog.

---

From day one, Moose has never been an easy dog to own. He kind of fell into my life before I was probably really ready for him and when I thought I was getting a dog that would help me make friends in my brand new city - Madison is full of dog parks and dog-friendly breweries - I was actually getting a dog that was so leash-reactive I could hardly walk him around the apartment without an incident. I’d say 80% of our walks in the first year had me in frustrated tears because I just couldn’t understand why he couldn’t handle the sight of another dog.

We’ve worked really hard and we’ve worked through a lot of it. He has good days and bad days, like we all do. Sometimes he doesn’t even bat an eyelash at other dogs and other times he absolutely loses his shit - and on those days we go home, we go to bed, and we try again the next day.

Owning a dog with such intense reactivity and anxiety has taught me not only to be more patient with him, but to be more patient with my own struggles with depression and anxiety and to take better care of myself. Some days, he’s the only reason I can make myself do anything at all - I have to go to work because if I don’t I won’t be able to feed him and I have to get some fresh air because he needs a daily walk.

Even on Moose’s worst days, he’s still spoiled with peanut butter and ear rubs and 90% of my bed. I hope all of our dogs can teach us to love and forgive ourselves as much as we love and forgive them.