Searching for Signs of Myself at the End of the World
Could pandemic fiction ever have prepared me — a clinically depressed person — for the COVID-19 crisis?
When I first read about a novel coronavirus quickly spreading across China in late 2019, a great sense of foreboding washed over me. As someone with depression and anxiety, I felt an urgent need to bathe myself in worst-case-scenarios. I turned to pandemic fiction.
My subconscious was craving confirmation that I could survive: survive both the public tragedy of a deadly, highly contagious virus, and the private catastrophe of my mental illness. I bounced from the sublime to the ridiculous.
First, I read Emily St. John Mandel’s literary novel Station Eleven. Next, I binged all four seasons of the dark comedy tv series The Last Man on Earth. By then, we were on lockdown and my anxiety was through the roof. I had trouble sleeping: I’d spend hours tossing and turning, panicking about the prospect of my extended family getting sick.
Post-apocalyptic fiction is comforting because we identify with the survivors, we see ourselves as one of the lucky…
