It was during a late-night run to Lowe’s for any remaining N95 masks that I began to suspect I was propelled by something more than common sense. Perhaps, I told myself, the threat of a pandemic had brought to the surface the alienation I feel in a middle-class Connecticut suburb, after growing up poor. “These wealthy so-and-so’s will just close their gates and sic the dogs on me,” I texted my siblings. Or maybe I was anxious about living on the crowded East Coast, where I can’t literally head for the hills at the first sign of trouble, as I could on the Ozark farm where I grew up.
My blunt childhood friend, Krystal, diagnosed a different cause for my anxiety: “You were raised in a bit of a doomsday cult,” she texted, after I confessed I’d been binge-shopping. “It’s natural your brain would go to the worst-case scenario.” It’s been 27 years since I left the Jehovah’s Witnesses. I went to an Ivy League college, attended graduate school, built a writing career and married a man as irreligious as I am. It’s easy to forget how devout I was in my formative years, when I believed that Armageddon could arrive any day. The coronavirus crisis has reawakened feelings I haven’t experienced since.
