Aiden Olson - Personal Experiences With COVID

00:00 All right. Hello, my name is Aiden Olson. I am 23 years old. Today is March 5 of 2024, and I am speaking with myself. I have written down what I want to say, and I'm recording this interview in Orange, California. I hope my microphone is picking up what I am saying and let's begin. So, like I said, my name is Aiden and I'm 23 years old. My name wasn't Aiden when the pandemic hit, but it is now. I was in my second year of college in 2020. On Wednesday, March 11, I got a job offer to be a resident assistant. On Thursday, March 12, my best friend came to visit me in my college dormouse. On Friday, March 13, we sat on the couch together while I scrolled on my phone and saw all the news reports of COVID spreading in the United States. And that was when I knew that things would really, actually change. There were five people and one dog living in that dorm, including me. At the beginning, we thought we could all stay together on campus, but then our parents wanted us at home or they couldn't afford the housing fees anymore or what have you. And one by one, we realized we weren't going to see each other again until September at the very least. I'm still grieving that third quarter at school a little bit. We were very close, and we had plans. My roommate Shane had gone apocalypse shopping, as we called it, and we had pounds and pounds of pasta and a whole cooler of meat in the freezer. And we were going to drag in the mattress of our honorary roommate, Kaz, to stay with us, too. And we were going to keep having painting nights and make a bunch of pickles and all sorts of things. But by the end of spring break, we were all gone. And I never saw two of my roommates again. One evening before anyone had left, but after Covid was definitely in the States, my roommate Jackie came to myself, Maya, and Shane, and said she was feeling pain in her stomach and she was panicking. We looked up her symptoms and tried to figure out if it was Covid or some other stomach issue that was equally devastating because we couldn't really go to the hospital about it. And we were getting more and more worried until Jackie excused herself to the.

02:17 Bathroom and ripped a massive fart. I don't think I've ever laughed harder.

02:24 My roommate Jackie and I were the last to go on the last Saturday of spring break. It was the last day that we could cancel our housing contracts. I managed to push my parents back that long because I told them that my roommate Shane volunteered at a hospital that had COVID patients, and I wanted to be sure that I hadn't caught it. Everyone else had gone by the start of spring break, so for about a week, it was just us packing up our things and cleaning up our dorm and trying to split up the truly enormous quantity of food that we had that, for one reason or another, we'd left behind. We were a really close knit group, and so many of our things we owned together. And I kept thinking, like, how do you divide up a life? How are you supposed to disentangle everything we did together? Like, at, like, the point of it was never that.

03:10 It was ours and not just mine.

03:12 I ended up with most of the art from our wall, all of which I still own and treasure for a long time. I had my roommate Maya's mirror and a box full of my roommate Shane's dog supplies. Shane's dog is named Lucy, and I loved that little sausage so much. We used to go on dog walks together, and Lucy would sleep in my bed sometimes. She's in New York now, and I haven't seen her since March of 2020. I've managed to keep 15 pictures of Lucy, even though my phone got wiped twice. And I've recovered a few pictures of all of us roommates from said roommates when I've seen them since. The week where Jackie and I were alone was very strange. We didn't go outside except to do laundry once, and it was dead quiet. Like, dead fucking silent. And we were in the middle of campus. I went onto our balcony every morning, and I sang as loud as I could to get a little bit of sun that came through the buildings and to remind ourselves or to remind myself that there were people living here. We had spent the least amount of time around just each other out of all of us roommates. But that week, we spent nearly every waking moment together. One morning, I spent in my room watching a steam powered giraffe livestream concert, and she knocked on my door, worried about me because I hadn't come out of my room by 11:00 a.m. i felt kind of bad because she had been for so long looking forward to going to Disneyland with her best friend, whom she hadn't seen in ages, and she had to cancel it, whereas I had just managed to squeak by with a visit to my best friend the week before. I didn't want to go back home to my parents because I wasn't out of as transgender to them yet. I had only just figured it out about myself a few months beforehand, and it was far too vulnerable and new for me to trust them with it. I came out to them a little over a year later, and I'm glad I waited. But in March of 2020, I was staring down the barrel of six months at my parents house, unable to see anyone at all, and compressing myself into someone small enough for them to understand. And I dreaded it. Maybe I would be there even longer if I couldn't keep my ra job. I didn't know if I would still have it. That summer I wrote to my friend Sybil. I wrote something along the lines of, I feel like my heart is made of sand and it's caving in. I'm scared that when I go back to college I'll have packed myself away so thoroughly that there won't be anything left to bring back out.

05:36 I didn't feel despair exactly.

05:38 I more felt closer to Numba. I felt flat, maybe, or like the world was losing color, but at the same time like I couldn't stand to keep still, even though I was keeping still all day. The day that I got home from college, I took all the old t shirts in the house and I cut them up into masks on my bedroom floor from a pattern that I'd seen on Tumblr. I did that for two days straight, and by the end of it, my hand hurt quite badly. I hadn't taken any breaks in cutting, even though I could feel the pain building. After that, I took all the aloe gel in the house and I found some 90% rubbing alcohol and I made two large bottles of hand sanitizer using a recipe that I also found on Tumblr. I think the hand sanitizer that I made then is still mostly full. Or if it isn't, it's gone bad. It always smelled kind of funky, but it did definitely work. So a couple weeks after I got back home, my mother tried, or my mother brought her friend over to the house for about 4 hours. They were inside the house for at least half of it. I was so angry at her and I was terrified, and I felt violated too. I hid in the back of my closet until she was gone and I cried myself out there. And as soon as she left, I tried to tell my parents that they couldn't do that shit because it was dangerous. I got three words in and I started sobbing again. I think I shocked them because they hadn't seen me cry for a very long time. I talked with my mom for another hour at least while I was still crying, and I tried to ask her not to bring anyone else over, please. But she refused to promise me that. She said things during that conversation that I will never forgive her for. She told me that if an immunocompromised person died of COVID then it was probably their time anyways. Incidentally, my friend Eve, who I love more than I can say, is immunocompromised and was 15 years old at the time. I tried to tell my mother this through, of course, a fresh wave of sobbing, and she said, well then, I won't breathe on Eve. As if this resolved everything. So during the spring quarter, I took zoom classes, and we set up little cubicles at the dining room table for my twin sister and myself. I was taking exclusively economics and accounting classes that quarter, and I hated them all. That quarter was the first time I ever failed a class, and I failed two out of four, even though I took multiple pass no pass. My econometrics course. I failed because I had Zoom issues on one of the recorded midterms and I slept through another midterm. Also, I was really bad at that class, but I failed courses that quarter. And so because of it, I took summer classes to catch back up. I failed at least one of those. Also, it took until the end of my fall quarter, third year, until I realized that I had to change my major. So in the spring and summertime, I felt like I was crawling up the walls. And also like if I was around my parents for longer than absolutely necessary, I would crawl out of my skin. Especially when the black lives matter protests started. I desperately did not want to be around them long enough to hear the absolutely heinous shit they thought about that. So to stop myself from crawling up the walls, I did some art projects. I made myself a mask of the red death costume. I made a plague doctor mask, and I made a fantasy cloak. Someone on Tumblr had quilted a plague doctor mask and put the pattern up for free. So I made some adjustments, and I made it out of leftover foam core board from my old theater design class. And then I covered it in a dark purple like, taffeta ish fabric. I popped the lenses out of an old pair of sunglasses for the eye holes. For two out of the three projects, I was definitely subsuming my frustration about how flippantly so many people, especially my parents, were treating the pandemic. So to stop myself from crawling out of my skin. Conversely, I took some snacks and water out of the kitchen and I stashed it in the back of my closet. That was the only place that I could go where no one would find me. And I've always liked small, dark, enclosed spaces. I hid there, often for hours at a time, and to this day, I've never told my parents that I used to go in there. I went to the park sometimes, too, but not as frequently. I've always needed to be alone more than I needed to be out. But that summer, one day when my parents were out, I came out to my brother as transgender. My sister had known as long as I had. Of course, my brother already knew I was queer, and he's always been supportive as if it's the easiest thing in the world, and I love him for that. He also, crucially, was willing to keep it on the down low until I came out to my parents, which I knew wouldn't be for another few months at least. Again, he did it like it was the easiest thing in the world. One day, when my parents were out again, when almost everyone was out, actually, I think I borrowed my dad's camera and I recorded a coming out video. My plan was to come out to my parents the night before I left for college again, and then to immediately send the video to my extended family so that my parents wouldn't have any time at all to keep reinforcing in their minds the wrong pronouns for me. I didn't come out that summer, and I ended up recording another video and then coming out to my parents over Skype while I was at school. But I kept the rest of the plan intact. I was worried the whole summer long that my resident assistant job offer would be suspended, but thankfully, it wasn't. I went back to college for training in early September, about three weeks before any students did. The campus was almost completely empty, and there were frequently rabbits hobbling all over of the grassy areas. It was peaceful, and I liked it quite a lot, not least because I knew it was supposed to be this way and it wouldn't be this way for long, going back to school and telling everyone there that I was transgender. And I used they them pronouns and having them accept it so easily. Washington. Kind of like seeing in color again. I couldn't see any of my residents in person, and all of the events that I put on were virtual, too. Hardly anyone came to the virtual events, which was fair because they were, frankly, dog shit. But I had one on ones with every single resident that fall over Zoom, and most of them lasted almost an hour. I think we were all kind of starved for human interaction. All my residents were first years, poor dears, and they told me about how they missed almost all of their senior year activities. I'm really glad, actually, that I'm exactly the age that I am because I had a full year of college under my belt before the pandemic hit and I got to graduate in person and.

12:05 Into a slightly less horrifying job market.

12:08 Than if I was a little older. I was far happier at college than at home, but I was still isolated. I was on discord with my friends very frequently, playing d and d commonly, and I would text with others, and some of my friends were even on campus so I could go see them, but I couldn't touch anyone, and I didn't meet in person very frequently at all. In the spring of 2021, I figured out that if I layered a hot pad between myself and my giant stuffed.

12:34 Bear, it almost felt like a hug.

12:37 I did that every night for a while.

12:40 The only thing I was really starved for was skinship.

12:44 My world became very small during that time. I mapped out the exact parameters of my bedroom, and I would pace through it pretty frequently. And I would pace up and down my apartment 5 seconds end to end while I waited for my food to microwave. I pulled my first and only all nighter that year, and when I came back home for a summer break, I didn't speak for three days. It was into this small world being wound up and wound up by so many horrible things happening and my government in so many ways, actively making it worse and not being able to do anything about it, that the tv show.

13:18 Supernatural fell like an atomic bomb. So it was three days after the election, while I was pacing back and.

13:26 Forth digitally refreshing my social media and then refreshing the election map and then refreshing the CNN coverage when I caught.

13:33 Wind of supernatural season 15, episode 18 airing. And, um, okay, so suffice to say, they did something really unexpected and really fucking funny, especially if you know the history of the show. I had never watched Supernatural, but I had heard some of the history. And when I heard the news, I absolutely fell over myself laughing, and I got swept up in the mass hysteria of it all. And three and a half years later, I'm still kind of insane about this stupid show. I do mean like mass hysteria. Like the show, which had been hemorrhaging viewers for years, trended on Twitter above the still undecided election kind of mass hysteria. People who had watched the show as kids had it activate like a sleeper agent in their brain. And for a night, there was wild, bacchanalian revelry while we spread misinformation about Putin's retirement through supernatural means.

14:27 So for a better part of a.

14:29 Year, that show was my most reliable source of undiluted emotion. Usually that emotion was horrified laughter and also feeling kind of deranged watching everything happen and being like, is anyone else fucking seeing this? But anyways, back to November 5. I think it was the next morning.

14:49 That the Associated Press called the election.

14:51 For Biden, and when I went to.

14:53 Go get my COVID test at the campus center that morning, someone was blasting party in the USA from their balcony. I danced along to it while I.

15:01 Was walking, and that memory sticks in.

15:03 My brain as one of the most.

15:04 Quintessentially 2020 memories I have.

15:09 So in February, I was one of the first people on campus to get my vaccine. Because I was technically an in person worker. I signed up for it as soon as I could, and I got my first shot on February 21 and my second shot on March 14.

15:22 I was really, really, really excited the.

15:25 Night before my vaccine.

15:26 I almost couldn't sleep as soon as.

15:28 My best friend, the one who visited me in March 2020, had gotten the vaccine and waited the waiting period too. I went to visit him for a weekend. It was the first time I had seen anyone in person unmasked and been able to touch them skin to skin since March of 2020. And I was so excited to see him again, I found myself planning out.

15:47 Like, okay, if I wear a tank.

15:48 Top, I'll have more skin contact when we hug. I should wear shorts too, for the same reason we spent just about the entire weekend cuddling together, watching movies on the couch. I think we both really needed that. So at some point, I wandered campus at night in my cloak and my plague doctor mask.

16:07 I don't really know why I did that.

16:09 I mean, probably for the same reason I took a walk around my neighborhood in my mask of the Red Death costume in spring 2020. I needed some kind of novelty, and also I couldn't pretend that everything was fine and dandy. I had to externalize it somehow. I've always sort of looked to history, especially historical clothing, to help process what I'm feeling and to give me structures to deal with it.

16:32 When I think about losing a loved.

16:34 One, I remember victorian mourning customs, and especially the mourning veil that served as a physical barrier to help the grieving person go into the world without having to fully face it. I was extraordinarily lucky to not lose anyone near me to Covid, at least so far. But I know that the next time I lose someone I love, I will almost certainly buy a morning veil, a real, like victorian style one. Not one of those mesh veils that don't actually hide your face. It might be in poor taste then, just as it might have been in poor taste to do the mask of the red death and the plague doctor thing.

17:07 But I think I'll need a veil.

17:08 Much in the same way as I needed the red Death and the plague doctor mask. So fast forward through fourth year of college after I changed my major to take classes I already liked. That's not really relevant here.

17:20 What is relevant is that because of.

17:22 The pandemic, remote jobs became a lot more common, and it turns out that I really need to work remotely in order to maintain any kind of equilibrium. I found this out the hard way by working in person for nine months after college until I had no energy to do anything, until I was finally able to take a week of PTO. And I found myself thinking at the end of it that I would do anything not to go back to work on Monday. Admittedly, the nature of my job didn't help. It was a workers compensation claims exam or job, which is pretty much the definition of soul crushed. But now that I do payroll taxes remotely, I am so much happier and I have so much more energy not just to do things outside of work, but to actually do my work too. The reason why I need remote work is mostly that I'm autistic, which I didn't actually find out until around April of 2022.

18:17 I really can't do both my work.

18:19 And maintain a professional image in a cubicle surrounded by people 8 hours a day. That's just not possible for me. The pandemic kind of threw things into sharp belief, like, you know, maybe not.

18:31 Speaking for days at a time and.

18:33 Constantly seeking out small dark, enclosed spaces.

18:35 And becoming rabidly obsessed with a few very specific subjects for years and years isn't the most neurotypical way I could behave. I got peer diagnosed, that is to say, a friend of mine got formally diagnosed and then they looked at me and said, hey, you're a lot like me in some very specific ways. Come take the rads are test with me. Oh will you look at that. You got 135 and the minimum autistic score is 65. And absolutely no one I have told so far was remotely surprised that I'm not the paragon of neurotypicality I had previously assumed myself to be. Most people assumed I already knew I was neurodivergent, and several were quite certain that I already knew I was autistic. Specifically, I'm not pursuing a formal diagnosis.

19:21 Because I need neither accommodation nor validation. And I've gone through the diagnostic criteria and I fit them very neatly, as do a few of my family members, incidentally. So I've continued to wear a mask anytime I'm inside a public space. I and my roommates buy kn ninety five s and forty packs. We're usually the only ones wearing masks anywhere we go. I've never gotten flack for wearing one, but once a woman came up to us at a target and thanked us for still wearing masks due to a combination of luck, general introversion, and precaution, but mostly luck, to be honest. To my knowledge, I've never had Covid.

20:00 I. Excuse me.

20:02 I managed to avoid it when my brother caught it during the last days of winter break. And I was in the house with him for three days before I went back to college. And I avoided getting normal sick a few times. Also when my college roommates caught the frat flu that was going round and when my workers compensation co workers were passing a flu around in wintertime. I haven't completely avoided getting sick, though. In March of 2023, I caught a cold and it lasted for like three weeks because I was so stressed and tired at work. I've been lucky. I have friends who caught Covid and I have friends who got long Covid too, and they weren't substantially less cautious than me. They were just unlucky. I've gotten each vaccine and booster as soon as I could, and I know I'm an outlier on that, too. My dad's side of the family, but not my dad, blessedly are anti vaxxers.

20:50 For some godforsaken reason. And, uh, well, I guess I'm never seeing them in person again.

20:59 I will not willingly be around anyone who has not been vaccinated for Covid.

21:04 At least the original rounds.

21:05 That much I will not budge on. I don't really know how to begin to comprehend the scale of the death that Covid and our government's fucking horrible response to it has caused. As of today, it's over 1,100,000 in the United States alone. And the CDC has once again lowered their quarantine period for people who have contracted Covid. How do you like, how do you even begin to tally the amount of blood that my government has on its hands?

21:37 There's so much that the government could.

21:39 Have done and just didn't.

21:41 And because of it, hundreds of thousands of us Americans died of COVID and.

21:46 Thousands more are permanently disabled from long Covid.

21:49 And our government didn't do mask mandates.

21:52 And stay at home mandates and vaccine mandates and continued monetary support and paid.

21:56 Sick leave and even just fucking maintaining an emergency store of PPE for what? Like personal liberty? I'm sure I'll feel very free when I'm forced to come into work sick because I can't afford to take sick.

22:08 Leave and the CDC recommended quarantine time.

22:10 Got lowered to fucking nothing. I know I'll feel really free when.

22:14 I'm bed bound from COVID that I.

22:15 Got because our government couldn't be bothered to treat the pandemic like the ongoing.

22:19 State of emergency that it is.

22:20 And oh my God, I would feel just so stuffed full of goddamn individual.

22:25 Choice if I was forced to stay.

22:26 Home for four years because I was immunocompromised. And Brenda in whole foods refuses to.

22:31 Get vaccinated because she thinks the pfizer comes with a mind control chip. And I know I felt really liberated.

22:38 When the actual economic son of a bitch. I know I felt really really liberated when actual economists were actually saying that old people should actually reenter the labor force and die of COVID to keep the economy going. This stupid fucking country refuses, just refuses to do anything for the collective good because it's so shit scared of communism that it'd rather grind the population to death on its wheel of fucking quarterly.

23:05 Profits than accept that there are things.

23:07 More important than money. And one of those things is human life. And we still have privatized fucking healthcare. If anyone's trying to take a lesson from all of this, then I hope to God that your government gives a single solitary fuck about its constituents. And I hope to God that you do your utmost all the time to make your government give a single solitary fuck about the people it's supposed to better the lives of fight for, like universal healthcare and universal basic income so people have options when they have crises. Agitate for safety measures and backups and more extensive government benefits and anything at.

23:46 All that you can.

23:47 But don't let political agitation be the.

23:50 Only way that you try to make change.

23:53 It's critical, obviously, but the results are a damn sight slower than doing what.

23:57 You can peer to peer.

23:59 So, like, make masks and donate them.

24:01 Or volunteer your time to construct face shields or share your grocery budget with a fellow student who's running out of their meal plan. Donate money if you can spare it.

24:10 And food if you have extra, and.

24:12 Time and expertise if you have any, to give. One of the things that saved my mental state in March and April of 2020 was that my sister and I gathered up every last scrap of cotton fabric that we had, and we made masks, assembly line style, to donate to one of the local assisted living facilities that was in desperate need of them.

24:30 Our governments don't do enough.

24:32 They just don't.

24:33 And there's hundreds of millions of people.

24:35 It is purposefully allowing to suffer through its negligence.

24:39 But if you only think on that.

24:41 Scale, you will feel like you are.

24:43 Dying all the time.

24:45 But right in front of you, there.

24:46 Is someone who needs help, and there.

24:48 Is something that you can give them.

24:50 You can't help everyone, but you can.

24:52 Make a difference to one person.

24:56 But don't take this as an ultimate message of hope and togetherness that outshines the tough times or whatever. The United States government purposefully let over.

25:05 A million people die and thousands more.

25:08 Become permanently disabled through deliberate negligence.

25:12 It has done this before, and it will do it again. Do not ever become complacent. As long as you live in a world where a travesty on this scale is even remotely conceivable, you have work to do. And if you no longer live in.

25:27 Such a world, do everything in your.

25:30 Power to ensure that it stays that way. It.