BY
When I told my editors at The Daily Beast that I needed to quit my job as the newsroom’s lead COVID reporter, I couldn’t even say the word “quit.”
Even now, weeks later, it feels like admitting failure.
I was working my dream job in a newsroom I loved where I was writing about what felt like the most important beat in the world. I felt lucky to be employed and alive in the middle of a global pandemic.
But in between meetings and interviews and filing stories, I was falling apart. I was writing poems about suicide. I went whole days without eating at all. At one point, I collapsed onto the floor from dehydration. I was vomiting from stress. I developed a stye in my left eye. I wasn’t getting out of bed most days. I was crying all the time. My nightmares, in which I was shot or raped or watching coworkers burn alive in front of me, scared me so much that some nights I refused to sleep at all. When I wasn’t too afraid to sleep, I was still restless because I was too angry or too anxious or too sad or too filled with shame. I sometimes woke in the early morning hours with bile climbing up my throat and the simmer of heartburn in my chest. There were times I took sick days because I couldn’t stop sobbing long enough to string even a few pitches together.
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