Navigating the Pandemic as a Hypochondriac in a World Obsessed With Identity
For as long as I can remember, I have lived as if everything is contaminated and out to get me. My hygiene habits include the typical incessant hand washing, as well as other behaviours that leave others scratching their heads. “Wait, can you hand me my fork, please?”, I say to the host of a dinner party I attend, so as to ensure that it is placed directly on my plate, not on the placemat. In my mind, putting anything that will go in my mouth on that placemat, despite the fact that I know it is freshly washed, is equivalent to eating off the floor. I refuse to touch anything before eating; my hands remain clenched in fists to avoid contact. And don’t even get me started on the Petri dish that is the communal snack bowl. My family and friends have become accustomed to my eccentricities, and have gone to great lengths to accommodate me. My expressions of disgust and horror at even the slightest threat of contamination are instantly recognizable to anyone who knows me, but when I’m out and about I’ve been told I come off as everything from disrespectful to insane.
Allow me to clarify. Whenever I pass by someone smoking, I hold my nose so as not to breathe in any of the fumes they’re emitting. Whenever I get takeout, I watch the food-handler’s every move intensely, making sure they wash their hands, and keep their workstation clean. There have been times I’ve thrown out food after seeing it handled in an unsanitary way. Now when it comes to strangers coughing, sneezing, and exhibiting other symptoms of sickness, I will do anything necessary to avoid them. If I pass by someone and they cough, my first reaction is to move as far away from them on the sidewalk as possible (without jumping into traffic, of course). Sometimes they notice, sometimes they don’t, but when they do, I know it makes them self-conscious. I’ve gotten off buses and skytrain cars because someone has coughed or sneezed, or looks ill. Now these have been everyday occurrences in my life since I was a child. For the most part it was all precautionary, there was no particular threat; but then came COVID-19.
Before long, everybody was sanitizing, keeping their distance, and taking extensive measures to ensure cleanliness. All of a sudden my obsession with hygiene that had for so long been seen as crazy was becoming the norm. At the beginning of the pandemic, there was an increase in anti-Asian sentiment as some people associated the virus with its country of origin, and treated anyone with Asian heritage as walking pathogens. Among those who engaged in these behaviours, there were certainly racists using the pandemic as an excuse to engage in discrimination against Asians. I began to wonder, however, whether people were lumping me in with the racists because of my aversion to anyone showing symptoms of sickness. Looking back I am sure there were times that I gave someone a look or moved seats after they coughed, and they just happened to be of Asian descent. I am sure there were times someone sneezed and I crossed the street to avoid them, and they just happened to be of Asian descent.
To an outsider who has no idea that I just did the same thing after seeing a white man sneeze in front of me, I can see how my behaviour in that isolated incident would make me appear to be a cold-hearted racist. This caused me to start to become extremely self-conscious in these situations. Whenever the person sneezing or coughing was White, I would promptly move as far away as I could, but if they happened to be a minority, I would pause and think about the optics of my actions. “Will I look like a bigot if I cross the street after someone coughs if they’re Asian? If they’re Black? If they’re LGBTQ?” These thoughts often lead me to ditch my plan and continue right past them as if they hadn’t coughed. This abandonment of my sanity in favour of not wanting to appear discriminatory has on more than one occasion led me to start panicking. So in today’s political climate where identity reigns supreme and terms such as racist and bigot are bandied about more than ever, what course of action do hypochondriacs like me take? How far should we go making ourselves feel uncomfortable in order to appear inoffensive to others?
