This Is How I Stay Sane While Quarantining By Myself.

Deniz Çam
6 min readApr 20, 2020

What to do when you’ve already spent hours reading fanfic about Adam Driver, and there’s still a pandemic outside?

Now-defunct McDonald’s cherry pie

Cherry pies from McDonalds is all I think of when I recall having pneumonia as a 10-year-old. My parents, both doctors, had different approaches to the sickness that kept me (and them) up at night with never-ending coughing fits. Most of the time, the thing that helped me breathe easier was the tiny steam-room my mom created by putting a towel over my head and vaporizing Vicks in boiling hot water under the makeshift tent. And once, it was a quiet hospital room where they gave me oxygen.

Twice a day, in the morning and at night, my mother stabbed my butt with a vaccine while my dad, also a surgeon, left the apartment because he couldn’t bear seeing me like that. So instead, he crossed the railroad in front of our apartment in Istanbul for the McDonalds on the other end, and bought me one of my favorite desserts ever: A McDonalds cherry pie. Nothing beats the sensation of burning your tongue with the piping-hot cherry mix oozing out of that perfectly crispy dough. Especially after you got your sixth shot in three days.

My mom hated being the bad cop; to this day she talks about how much she dreaded giving me the vaccines but she has also chased me down in our three-bedroom apartment with a flu shot in her hand once, so her track record will never be clean. When I got pneumonia again a year later, she ordered honey from the Black Sea region as well as dead nettles, mixed them, and for weeks made me eat a spoonful of what tingled in my mouth like poison.

My recurring bronchitis broke my mother briefly, the woman who had dedicated her life to medicine. “A friend told me this works,” she kept on saying every single time I opened my mouth and screamed “Aaaah!”. Apparently, in a Turkish village somewhere by the Black Sea, across from Russia, this was how people built their immune system.

My dad, well, he enjoyed being the highlight of my getting that terribly sick. Once in a while, he even bought the toy of a Happy Meal without the meal itself so I eventually built a miniature Barbie set one year and a colorful Betty Spaghetty collection the year after, both of which my parents keep in a box back home with the silent implication that should I wish to become a mother myself, I have a box of Happy Meal toys I can pass on to my daughter. I’m sure she would appreciate seeing how much dolls’ faces — and our beauty standards — have changed since 2002.

Eighteen years later and 5,000 miles away, there are no cherry pies or even bitter herbs in the midst of a pandemic. There is just me, in my one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn, undulating between total hopelessness (What if I never see my family again? What if they need me and I’m not there?) and reasonable hopelessness (I probably won’t see my family for a few more months). “I feel very bad for you,” a good friend told me over the phone at the beginning of the quarantine; she is with her family. I felt a shiver move down my body. No need, I snapped back which forced her to clarify her point: “It’s not pity. I just imagine it must be very tough being alone at this time.”

As much as I’d like to tell myself that I am strong enough to do well on my own, it is actually very normal to need our loved ones at times of distress, according to Theresa DiDonato, who is an associate professor of psychology at Loyola University. “The foundational pull towards our primary attachment relationships — the tether that keeps us to them — may be heightened when we’re under threatening conditions,” she says, especially if we see them as a “safe haven” or “sources of comfort and support.”

I regularly joke about being single, but for the first time, after almost a decade in the U.S., I found myself wondering how I ended up so alone to the extent that I watch people flee New York City to be with family or partners and I have no way of taking care of my family or being taken care of. For once, I truly felt useless and needy. But maybe, many of us are in the same boat.

By the time it was my eighth day into self-isolation, I had worked long days as a journalist, spent hours on the phone talking to friends and family, joined TikTok, made five videos that I personally laughed at, read Casey McQuiston’s Red, White, & Royal Blue, and finished a 100,000+ word fanfic about Ben Solo and Rey from Star Wars. DiDonato, who has specialized in romantic relationships, says it could be a good idea to immerse ourselves in fictional worlds through books and movies, which can temporarily ease our stress. But she also suggests that reminiscing and thinking about loved ones can allow us to temporarily feel as if we are loved and taken care of. Watch old videos or flip through an album, she says — and of course, exercise and eat well, both of which I’ve failed at so far so I go back to my loved ones.

“Even the perception that you have support can be beneficial,” says Regan Gurung, a psychology professor at Ohio State University. That encourages me to reshape the way I think about connections and find peace in all the support I’ve been getting so far via random postcards or funny tweets that pop up on my screen — and all the love I’ve been trying so hard to give through different mediums such as a brief phone call to my grandmothers or a meme to our family WhatsApp group.

I have such a hard time saying goodbye to people, especially at airports. Twice a year, my family and I hug, separate, cry, and hug again at the airport in Istanbul before I go get my passport stamped to fly off to America. And yet, the last time I saw my grandfather in January, I told myself not to cry. It was very out of character for me but I thought he looked healthier than I had last seen him six months ago. No need to cry; you’ll see him again. I was wrong. I never will.

As I stay in my apartment and watch my friends go their own way, from Florida to New Orleans to Istanbul, I push myself to stand a little taller instead of listening to my inner Nostradamus. What if, I ask myself, some of the things that have made me who I am are no longer there once this pandemic is done — and what if that is not such a bad thing? What if parting is not so debilitating to me anymore or I have an easier time standing behind my decisions, such as being an immigrant and voluntarily living 5,000 miles away from my family? What if, once all of this is done, I am just more comfortable in my skin in America and don’t conflate ‘alone’ with ‘lonely’, which I apparently carry around like a character trait?

“We all work to maintain a network of support that is almost like a convoy that follows us through life,” Gurung says. “People, who are supported and loved, are more resistant to viruses such as the common cold, show faster recovery, and studies even show wounds heal faster.” As much as this novel coronavirus is nothing like the common cold, I would like to believe that every single time someone shows up for me and every single time I show up for them, we are pushing back against the devastating impact of this fatal disease even just a little bit. And who knows, maybe we can eventually find a way to heal our wounds.

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Deniz Çam

An up-and-coming New Yorker, who is sometimes neither up nor coming. Follow me on Twitter @DenizCam