Why my Covid anxiety is spiking now, all these months later

Editor’s Note: Chris Cillizza is a CNN politics reporter and editor-at-large, covering national politics including the White House, Congress and every district they represent. The views expressed in this commentary belong to the author. View more opinion at CNN.

I remember the moment distinctly. It was Thanksgiving. We? – ?my wife, kids and mom – ?were at my college friend’s house with his family. Everyone was vaccinated and we had all taken rapid tests that morning to make sure it was safe to celebrate together.

That was the last day I felt relatively unworried about Covid-19.

(Looking back, I remember someone at that Thanksgiving dinner mentioning something about a “new variant,” but the combination of turkey, mashed potatoes and, well, a few mixed drinks, made it easy to overlook.)

Since the word “Omicron” entered our lexicon, every day has been filled with varying levels of stress.

Now, there’s the near-daily note from the boys’ school about students testing positive and the measures being put in place to contain it. There’s the parade of headlines that suggest Omicron is on the march in Europe? – ?and that a surge is inevitable in the United States.

Meanwhile, there are the invites to Christmas parties and for the kids to attend sleepovers and play dates. And holiday trips. And a million and one other things that require my wife and me to play the role of public health experts, trying to weigh the proper balance between risk mitigation and, well, living our lives.

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Here’s the problem. I’m not a public health expert or anything close to it. In fact, because of a long battle? –?I’m not sure who is winning at this point? – ?with health anxiety and compulsive behavior, I am a terrible person to be tasked with making these daily calls.

And yet, here we are. More than 20 months into this nightmare. More than a year after the first vaccine was administered in the United States. More than 800,000 deaths later, it seems there is no end in sight.

I feel emotionally raw. Everything from anger to exhaustion to resignation sits heavier on me now than it did at that Thanksgiving dinner a few weeks ago.

I’m exhausted from the constant not knowing. Each new day feels like it brings a darkening prediction of what the future holds, and I’m tired. I am a creature of habit. I love knowing what the next day will bring. With the pandemic, it feels like the situation is changing by the hour.

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And I’m resigned to the fact that none of this is going away anytime soon. The idea that Covid will be in the rear-view mirror by March feels, at this point, quaint. I have watched the goalposts for the end of the pandemic moved so many times that I can’t even remember where they were a month ago.

Let’s be clear: My life isn’t a hardship. I write for a living. I’ve spent most of the past 20 months working from home. My family has enough to eat and access to good medical care.

But, for me, these past few weeks have been some of the hardest of the entire pandemic. It felt like we were nearing an end, only to be pulled back in.

Now it feels like each new month will be worse than the last.

Predictions about the duration of previous Covid waves? – ?I’ve forgotten which one we are on now? – ?have, of course, been spotty. While my hope is that the current projections related to Omicron are wrong, any optimism I have for the future is shaky at best.

Doom and gloom is not my natural state. I usually love this interregnum between Thanksgiving and Christmas. People work, yes, but not all that hard. There’s plenty of Christmas cheer to go around and I take great joy in all the “best of” lists that come out this time of year.

Maybe that’s why this latest downturn in the news on Covid has hit me so hard. This has always been one of my favorite times of year. Now, it’s been filled with dread and foreboding.

All I know is that it’s been a long December. And I need to find reasons to believe that next year is something I can look forward to.