Covid Messed with my Psyche Big Time

But it wasn’t really “Covid” that’s been bothering me all along

I haven’t gone completely mad, but I’m definitely angry.

For almost three years, the madness of our Covid times has gnawed at my psyche.

I now realize the true source of my mental distress had little to do with some respiratory virus.

What’s bothered me (tremendously) is my intuitive understanding that all the experts and authorities the world trusts … got everything wrong. 

The truth, I quickly came to realize, doesn’t matter.  Lies matter more. 

As psychological breakthroughs go, this is bitter medicine.

None of this would matter except these lies happened to produce massive body counts and casualties. 

The never-ending lies also produced economic carnage and required Orwellian levels of censorship, which means those trying to counter dangerous lies in the future will also be blocked, resulting in further crimes against humanity.

That is, I quickly realized none of this is likely to stop, another source of psychological distress.

It’s the experts and authorities, who possess all the power, who concocted all the false narratives.

Members of these organizations are still perceived as more virtuous and intelligent than the skeptics, who were cast as the villains, kooks, “anti-vaxxers,” “science deniers,” “conspiracy theorists” and “extremists.” 

Those of us in this latter group, we’ve been told ad nauseam, represent the real threats to the world. We were and remain the Bad Guys.

It doesn’t matter that we’ve been right all along and the people we were trying to expose were wrong all along. 

I do feel like I’m in a ‘Twilight Zone’ episode …

My psychological angst also grew out of a conviction that my views are almost-certainly not going to prevail in today’s New Normal. No real “justice” is likely to be dispensed.

We’re like the character in a “Twilight Zone” episode who realizes everyone has become a zombie and he’s the only ones who see this. The true terror comes not from the monster who might kill us, but the fact that so few people realize who the real monsters are.

For too long, I thought that proving “early spread” was my ultimate goal. But this was just a means to an end. What I really hoped to achieve was to give the public incontrovertible reasons they should NOT trust the experts.

From one simple observation that became a conviction (one couple in Alabama had Covid in December 2019), I used deductive reasoning and extrapolations to conclude that millions of Americans must have already had Covid around or before the same time period. 

And, more importantly, that certain authorities must have known early spread was happening and have gone to great lengths to conceal this fact.

The fact something I knew was important was dismissed as insignificant was my first “tell” that my world view didn’t align with the prevailing narrative. 

Even the fact I figured out early spread (in about a day) bothers me.

Why was I one of the few people who realized this occurred and was, in fact, important? 

Shouldn’t the experts who went to college for eight years and had decades of experience in epidemiology have been able to figure this out instead of an obscure freelance journalist whose last science class took place in 11th grade?

All my conclusions are dark ….

But, for whatever reason, I did figure this out; thought it was a big deal and one dark truth led to more dark tunnels, which I probably should not have explored but I did. 

Conclusion 1: We should NOT trust our experts … as these faux experts are either shockingly ignorant or endemically corrupt.

Conclusion 2: If officials would lie and try to cover-up early spread, they would/might lie about lockdowns, masking, social distancing, effective alternative treatments, iatrogenic deaths, the importance of ventilators, the effectiveness of remdesivir and the importance of getting everyone vaccinated. 

If it was the “most important thing” for our rulers to get everyone vaccinated of course they would lie about these vaccines being “safe and effective.” 

Conclusion 3: The same people would lie about who was spreading “misinformation” (they were) and lie about the people who should not be allowed to participate in scientific debates (we the skeptics).

Growing up, I was taught (in school no less) that it was okay to question truths that were largely accepted; that it was okay to punch holes in false theories. People with superior critical thinking abilities or high IQs were put on a pedestal. The lesson was that these are the people we should listen to more closely than others.

Conclusion 4: But I now think this was a lie as well. Or, if this characteristic was once celebrated, this element of our culture has now been abandoned. The high-IQ contrarians who were screaming warnings were actually vilified, their voices dismissed. 

Conclusion 5: As far as I can tell, in every important organization in the world, the smart people with the principles to challenge false narratives are no longer valued. Such people (there’s not many left) have actually become the enemy.

It’s only recently that I’ve come to understand that all of these thoughts were spreading toxins in my sub-conscience; that it was the sum effect of all of these conclusions that massed against my mental health. 

I haven’t been angry at the entire world, just the people and organizations I think are trying to kill the world (almost every important organization and trusted leader in the same world).

I realize none of this is new to history. Galileo, one of the world’s greatest geniuses, was persecuted for being right. 

Still, I thought the Enlightenment had moved civilization out of the Dark Ages. My personal enlightenment tells me that this was not the case.

A few other sources that explain my anger …

The real sources of my gnawing and growing anxiety - my anger really - probably includes the following elements:

Darker days are coming .. In fact, they arrived three years ago. 

For whatever reason, I am one of the few people who “gets” this (and I should not be smarter than the “experts.”)  

I’d like to make some contribution to stop this, do something that might save lives and prevent unnecessary misery …

…. But I’ve concluded that people like me are going to continue to be ignored.

A search for the truth, or employing logic, aren’t enough to stop bad things from happening or to expose liars, frauds and criminals.

People who think like I do are badly outnumbered by people who don’t.

Some kind of tragic “tipping point” in society has probably already tipped in the wrong direction.

The feeling people like myself are left with is one of overwhelming impotence. 

There’s probably nothing we can do that will correct all the false narratives and make things better for people, which is all we really want.

If my wife and friends want to know “why did Bill change so much,” or why was he so obsessed with one topic, somewhere in this essay is the answer.

It wasn’t one thing that bothered me. It was many things, all of which bothered me on multiple psychological levels and all of which I wanted to change … but I couldn’t. 

So, at least so far, I’ve failed … at something that was important to me. 

My “contribution” - my little investigative journalism niche (proving early spread happened) - didn’t change anything.

Psychologically speaking, people like myself might have been better off being oblivious to all of the above.

In some ways, it’s better to not care about the Big Issues. If you never “got” all of these hard lessons, you would have slept much better and probably been a better husband and father.

But it’s not been all dark tunnels …

But, fortunately, I’m also intelligent enough to know this is only the bleakest diagnosis. 

Good things have also happened to me since I started questioning all the narratives. 

For example, I’ve now got my own Substack site, which has allowed my articles (and thus my original journalism and thoughts) to reach hundreds of thousands of people. 

I would have really gone mad if I didn’t know that millions of people think like I do. I do feel like I’m a soldier in a noble battle and I’m fighting on the right side with the “Good Guys.” 

I think our side is “moving the needle.”  If the Bad Guys win, they are also going to take some casualties and it hasn’t been in a rout.

I’ve studied some history. Per the historians, victors in a war worth fighting often went through dark days where it seemed like they’d never prevail … but they did.

That is, it’s too soon to say my own little contributions have been entirely in vain. 

Nor, if I could go back in time, would I choose to sit this fight out. The stakes are too high to do that. My DNA is not programmed to just shrug my shoulders and say, “what happens happens.”

If I’ve endured bouts of vague, free-floating depression or became obsessed over a topic that only seems to matter to me, I can at least recognize that people in other times experienced similar feelings in previous cultural battles. Their instincts must have been the same as mine … keep fighting. 

In Summary …

Although most of us never got that “sick” from it, Covid has taken a hell of a toll on all of us. 

I know it’s worked on me. It’s made me question everything I’d previously thought was true. It made me think that even though I knew I was right …. that “being right” might no longer matter.

That’s some heavy lessons right there. 

As I write this article, I still don’t know if my ability to see what so many “experts” couldn’t see was some kind of providential gift or some kind of curse. 

I guess the future will give us the answer.  

The present and recent past scare me and make me think the future, which my children will live in, might be even scarier.  Largely because of this, I decided to join the fight.

I just didn’t know the odds were going to be so stacked against my side and that in choosing to engage in this fight, I’d suffer so many psychological battle scars.

By now, everyone has been wounded by “Covid.” Except it’s not Covid that inflicted much of the substantive damage. It’s the experts and authorities we all trusted who caused the real damage. 

That’s who I started out trying to expose. I wanted to accomplish something that might make them stop doing what they were doing. If nothing else, I wanted more people to see who the real bad guys really are. 

We’re not the Bad Guys. They are. And I don’t want the Bad Guys to win.

The Bad Guys aren’t supposed to win … but so far, they are. 

I can’t tell you how much this has bothered me. 

Or I guess I just did.