I'm immunocompromised.
That's a word I'd not ever heard used in conversation before the last 4 months. All I knew is I sometimes got sick more frequently than other people. If you were to ask my mom back in the day or my wife today, they'd probably tell you that eating more vegetables would definitely help strengthen my immune system, and they're not wrong. But let's keep it 100, there are a ton on issues not related to the absence of leafy greens on my plate.
I have asthma- all things considered, it's really not that bad. The doctor called aggravated asthma. This means that unless I'm running or playing hoops, I never found myself in a situation where it was ever really an issue, which with pretty bad allergies, which was really the only other time it was an issue.
Being a cancer survivor, twice, also doesn't generally allow for the most robust immune system. Chemotherapy wreaks havoc on your body (it's literally a poison meant to kill cells that will kill you if you don't kill them- now imagine doing that to your body twice). I also have a bevy of other physical ailments, but I'm not sitting here trying to give any future employer a reason to not hire me, so we'll leave it at that.
For most of my life, the fact that I get sick more frequently has been something I've considered, but never really let direct my actions in any real, measurable way. I mean, I even spent a decade teaching high school kids and traveling with them on weekends. If you know anything about kids, know they're simultaneously Petri dishes of diseases and transfer hubs for vectors. This meant I spent from about late October to mid-April with varied illnesses- some enough to make me miss class, but most I just soldiered through. Did I worry about getting sick? Yeah, but not to the point where it changed my actions. But that was then.
That was before the Coronavirus Invasion- the Beatles of Infectious Diseases.
And now I have to consider, at every turn, that a careless misstep on my part or just shitty luck and I'm in a game of roulette. And that's terrible. It sucks knowing that if some asshat decides to stand too close to me in line at the grocery store and sneezes. Its miserable knowing I could be at the doctor getting a refill in some anxiety medication, touch the same counter as someone infected, and begin playing rock-paper-scissors with my mortality. It's atrocious even more that I could sit in my house and do my best to not leave the house and be safe. The pizza delivery person and cannabis delivery person may unknowingly bring me an unexpected guest with my delivered essentials. But of all those things that are a hypothetical dick punch, none of those things are what keep me up at night.
Nobody really gives a fuck about us. Which is pretty consistent with the indifference to ableism.
I'm a Black man, and I have been my entire life. This means I have lived a life where, depending on who sees me, I have an existence of hypervisibility and invisibility. People either *can't* see me or **all they see is me- not my essence, merely my presence. And although these are divergent worlds, they are, in all honesty, quite easy to navigate. Those that see you as hypervisible, my goal is to interact with them as little as humanly possible. People who see you (well, me) as hypervisible are always trying to find an appropriate box to put me in. Being hypervisible is what lets police officers see me, among 20 cars all driving the flow of traffic, to be pulled over. Being hypervisible is what makes (white) women cross the street to avoid me. It's why I'm asked, "Do you work here?" in a ton of grocers, Targets and Wal-Marts, but the place **where I actually worked** nobody ever assumed I did and was present to receive services. That's a slap in the face, but it's an expected and predictable one- and as much as I hate being hypervisible- I'm pretty good at it.
I'm also used to being invisible- in that people just don't see me. If I had a dollar for every person that runs into me and then tells me, "I'm sorry, I didn't see you," I could buy a home in 35 (31 red) states. I don't think people really get how **dismissive** that is. In 2011, I made a pact with myself- that if people didn't say "excuse me" when they passed, I would make **zero** effort to move. This led to an enjoyable year split about evenly with two types of people. The first set would run into me and become **really** apologetic (almost everyone- the phrase "I didn't see you" is sometimes attached to the apology). The second set was actively combative (almost exclusively white men) "why did you bump into me?!?! you trying to start something?" Let me tell you, it's hard being invisible, and it's hard being hypervisible. It would seem impossible to be **both things simultaneously**, and yet I had what appeared to be hundreds of these interactions that year. To be honest, in previous and subsequent years as well, I just couldn't see them coming until they happened- in 2011, I had a **pretty good idea** of the people who would start some bullshit. If I had to come up with a premise for **why** there was such a visceral reaction, I'd probably have to say it was my visibility. I'm sure he had been working hard to keep a world construction he was happy with, and what I am sure of, from those interactions, is that there are no Black men in any form of a protagonist role. We may be servants (think of most black and white movie, we may be sexual desires (think Idris Alba/Gabrielle Union), we can be athletes (think LeBron or Lamar Jackson), but we can't just be. We're not allowed to just be people. But if I want to keep it 100- being invisible to most people is my goal. I would love to walk through the world, being recognized by my friends and family, and being entirely anonymous to the rest of the world. Like most people.
The indifference of the treatment of people not fully able was simultaneously shocking and will-breaking. The first shock was the seeming inability to look at immunocompromised people as a group of people, rather than individuals in a group that can **also** be dismissed. Even the Surgeon General of the United States did this. He said, "we need you to do this, if not for yourself, then for your Abuela, doit for your granddaddy, do it for your Big Mama, do it for your pop pop. Now someday that's not today, we'll talk about that Stepin Fetchit shit that Surgeon General Adams did- I should shut up they coulda made that motherfucker do a shuffle too. But what he did there, other than being Uncle Ruckus level racist, was he took **a subset** of the immunocompromised and said, "let's do it for them. Other times, the conversation about the coronavirus attacks people everywhere, but it's been particularly damaging for people with some pre-existing conditions- diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, asthma, cancer, etc. That conversation **immediately** pivots to how that means it disproportionately affects Black and Brown people. I guess they hope that telling people that the disease is killing Black and Brown bodies would be an impetus for people to act in a way that would keep them safe. Which is the problem- we take immunocompromised people and dissect them into their (mal-intentioned) subgroup. When we're broken out of a collective group in need of protection and get broken into other groups, it allows for people to, as Ma Dukes might say, to "show they asses." When you break immunocompromised people into just old people, it allows us to be summarily dismissive of them. I mean, we're not the Inuit, who it has been said leave their elderly out on the ice to die, but with the mistreatment and horrific abuse stories from nursing homes, even before they became coronavirus death camps, maybe they'd be safer if we did. We live in a society that not only doesn't respect their elders, they are also generally willing to sacrifice them for their common good. The idea of taking an elderly person to die somewhere other than with their families is pretty white, and thus also pretty American).
The thing is, some people are immunocompromised that aren't old or have diabetes or hypertension. They're just people unfortunate enough to have at one time been ill and/or currently sick and suffering due to no fault of their own. Trust me, if, given a choice between being a two-time cancer survivor and being 100% healthy, I'd have opted for the one that didn't have them pump me full of poison and burn me from the inside. If you'd told me that because of cancer, **now** I get to worry about every jackass who decided it was more critical for them to go bowling or get a massage than to worry about some dude they don't know- 100% sure I'd have passed on it.
To be indifferent, in this instance, says more about you than the person you're indifferent towards. I am indifferent to little kids. They're not invisible like I wish they would be. They're clearly there, doing annoying kid shit. The other part is, for lack of a better way to describe it, I'm not **trying** to deal with a kid- they play so little a role in my day to day existence that I **flat out** don't acknowledge little kids. But here's the thing- I **fully recognize** that this lack of acknowledgment is solely because I don't give a fuck about a kid. My indifference to kids probably makes me (a bit of) a curmudgeon, but it's a pretty simple thing. Unless the kid is unlucky or shitty, someone out there is in the kids' corner- and that person is usually someone who can provide that kid some kind of protection. I don't have to have that kid's back- s/he doesn't know me from Adam...
In this society, under this pandemic, I feel like that kid, except I'm kind of an orphan. This means that everyone knows that I'm there- but nobody cares. I can handle being fetishized. I can deal with being feared. I can accept, and most of the time, enjoy, being invisible. Being treated as indifferent is worse than all of them.
They know you're there and they know you need them to help you. They just don't give a fuck.
Every time I see people at the beach, or walking around in groups, or even walking around without a mask on, I see the world giving the finger to every other immunocompromised person and me. When I see the government easing restrictions **everywhere** as the numbers are still increasing, it makes my blood boil. It means they made a **specific risk calculus** and decided that my life is worth rolling the dice for so people can hang out with friends at the beach, or if I lived in Georgia. Let's keep it 100: I'd never do despite Atlanta being Wakanda for my people) motherfuckers would be rolling the dice with my life to see the new Troll's movie. All of this is a vivid as fuck reminder of my individual value to the collective- and it's zero. I guess I now get to apply my "rules for getting in the car" for leaving my home at all. Is getting this fried fish worth the risk of being killed because of this choice?" For anyone who was supposed to meet me somewhere and I backed out at the last minute, I can pretty much guarantee **this** was the reason.
And it's hard to get in your car when you know that, once you leave home, the world has decided to play roulette with you- maybe you live because you went out today, but maybe not.
It's way, way harder to do it in **every** interaction I make out the house.
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