I Don't Think This Is Just a Me Problem

On vaccine purgatory, collective exhaustion, and what it means to keep building anyway

Everything feels drab lately. Like we’re going through the motions but not actually living.

I’ve been sitting with that feeling for a while now, trying to figure out if it was just me. My personal timeline over the last several years has been... a lot. I lost my dad. Then the pandemic hit. Then some personal and professional turmoil I haven’t fully grappled with yet. So, for a while, I told myself—okay, this is a Jess problem. This is grief. This is circumstance. This will pass.

But then I started paying attention to my closest friends. We’re scattered across different states now, all deep in the sandwich-generation moment… raising kids, watching our parents age, trying to hold our careers together. We used to actually talk. Now our group thread has basically become “proof of life check?” messages. I don’t think it’s about limited bandwidth; it’s that none of us quite have the words anymore, or the energy to find them. We all just know what it means— still loving each other, still here, but too drained to close the distance.

What I’m feeling—what I think a lot of us are feeling—is bigger than anything I can hold in one essay. There are things happening in this country and in this world right now that keep me up at night. Things that go so far beyond my professional lane, I don't even know where to begin.

The geopolitical instability. The erosion of things we thought were permanent. The sense that institutions we relied on are being hollowed out faster than we can track. The feeling that we can’t even agree on the same set of facts anymore— on what is fundamentally right and wrong, on what we owe each other as human beings. A lot of us are feeling betrayed. Terrified for our children. Scared in ways that go so much deeper than gas prices or the economy. It’s a fear that the ground beneath us is different from what we thought it was.

The truth is, I’m terrified to write about any of it directly. I’m afraid I can’t capture the weight of it — that anything I say will fall short of this moment. So I’m going in through a side door. It’s the only way I know how to do this, and maybe (as you’ll see) it’s not such a bad metaphor for the moment we’re in. Public health is my lane, my language, my comfort blanket… even in its current state of chaos and upheaval. Maybe that’s self-preservation. But it’s also this: it’s the corner of the world where I think I might actually be able to make things slightly less scary. I can’t chase all the monsters away, but maybe I can do something about this one. So that’s the lens I’m going to use. And I don’t think the feeling underneath it all is separate anyway. The drabness, the exhaustion, the “proof of life check?” texts — that’s the same thing, wearing different clothes, whatever corner of this moment you’re living in.

What I'm trying to name is this: we are living in a kind of collective purgatory —not the absence of crisis, but crisis without resolution—and it's reshaping how we feel, how we relate to each other, and how much we trust the systems meant to protect us.

Something shifted, and most of us felt it before we could name it.

The conditions were already there, years ago… the cost of everything quietly becoming impossible, a political climate that seemed to actively reward cruelty and punish nuance, a palpable “hate thy neighbor” energy seeping into ordinary life long before any of us had heard the word coronavirus. And then came COVID. Not as the cause of any of it, but as gasoline on a fire that was already burning.

For one strange, terrible moment right at the beginning— we were all in it together. Remember that? The fear was real, but so was something else. People checking on their neighbors. Healthcare workers cheered from balconies. A brief, fragile sense that we were a we. It didn’t last long. The fractures came fast, and when they came, they were ugly. But that moment existed, and I don’t think we should forget it.

What followed was an entire planet confronting its own mortality at once, and instead of that shared experience holding us together, it exposed every crack already there and made new ones. The threads of our social fabric pulled out with a dull needle. Not clean. Just slow and grinding and destructive of something that took generations to weave.

A lot of people I know feel this. Not in a vague cultural malaise way, but in a genuine, it’s really bleak, and sometimes you can’t even let yourself hope it gets better way. I see it in my text threads. I see it on social media. I see it in work meetings and even social gatherings. I see it in how strangers interact—or don’t.

Are we too far gone? Can we find our way back to each other? And what will our collective reset be?

Nowhere does that instability feel more concrete to me than in the systems I work in every day.

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Last week, spring showed up for about two days and showed a little leg. I wouldn’t know firsthand—I was completely down for the count with the flu. But even lying there, just feeling a little sunshine through the window felt like mainlining dopamine.

And it got me thinking about the moments when joy just shows up. The moment at a wedding when the dance floor pulls everyone in like a magnet, and then Shout comes on. Oh, I think you know what happens next. Everyone dropping a little bit softer, a little bit softer now, crouching down together toward the floor— and then that eruption back up, strangers and family and old friends all moving as one thing, nobody caring how they look, everyone just happy and feral. Or the last night of a family beach vacation, the kind where you actually unplugged. Kids, sandy and sun-kissed and blissfully worn out, everyone shuffling into the hotel restaurant still smelling like sunscreen and coconut, salt in your hair. Local food, cold drinks, nowhere to be, nothing urgent. Just that rare feeling of being exactly where you’re supposed to be with people you love. Bliss.

Even writing that is melancholy because it feels far away, just out of reach. Even with the wedding invites, even with the tropical excursions. Even when we're there, something is... off. Like we're almost happy. Like joy is arriving but not quite sticking. If you're a clinician and a patient walked in presenting with these symptoms, you'd know what to reach for. But what's the societal Lexapro?

And then Monday happened.

When the federal court ruling came down blocking RFK Jr.’s changes to the childhood immunization schedule, I wanted to feel relief… and I did, genuinely, in my bones. A federal judge looked at what happened to ACIP, the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee that has shaped American immunization policy for 60 years, and said: This was wrong. Dismantling it, firing qualified experts, replacing evidence-based processes with ideology—likely illegal. That matters. It was a public health win. Full stop.

But then I read The Atlantic’s headline: “A New Level of Vaccine Purgatory.” And I felt it immediately— that specific exhaustion of a win that comes wrapped in a caveat.

Our friends at CIDRAP’s Vaccine Integrity Project framed it in a way that stuck with me: when a patient’s vital signs fluctuate, you don’t declare the crisis over because one number temporarily looks better. You look at the whole picture. You examine trends. It’s not pessimism, it’s just being honest about where we actually are. Kennedy still leads HHS. Anti-vaccine advocates still hold senior roles at the CDC. The ruling will almost certainly be appealed. Structural damage doesn’t reverse itself overnight— not in how evidence is gathered, weighed, or translated into guidance for families.

So yes— a real win. And also: purgatory. That grinding, liminal space where the outcome is still uncertain and the waiting is its own kind of weight.

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Okay, bear with me here… especially if you haven’t seen The Good Place. I promise this will make sense in a second. Mild spoilers ahead.

The Good Place is a TV show about the afterlife, specifically about a group of deeply flawed humans trying to figure out how to be good people, and what they actually deserve when it’s all over. I’ve written about it before in the context of this work because life keeps imitating art.

I keep thinking about the ending. After countless tests and failures, the gang finally makes it to the actual Good Place— eternal paradise, everything they ever wanted. And yet… everyone is miserable. It turns out that forever, without stakes, without struggle, without any possibility of an ending, drains everything of meaning. You can have anything you want, always, and it turns out that’s its own kind of torture.

The fix they come up with is a door. A simple door that anyone can walk through whenever they’re ready, stepping out of existence, becoming part of everything, whatever comes next. And just knowing the door is there is what makes everything bearable again. Not walking through it. Just knowing it exists. Knowing there’s an out. Knowing it doesn’t go on forever.

I keep thinking about that door, except for us, the question isn’t how the good times end. It’s whether we can believe the bad times will.

And I do believe it. Not in an everything-happens-for-a-reason way. Not in a glass-half-full, optimism-porn way (trust me, that’s not who I am, and that’s not what this is).

Bad stuff is happening. In public health and far beyond it. We can’t look away from that. But seasons turn. There’s a reason that song has endured. To everything there is a season.

The darkness is real. The crises are real. But I have to believe—this is not forever.

In public health, we know what happens when people stop believing change is possible: they stop trying to make it so. Learned helplessness isn't just psychological; it's a public health risk. So holding onto the door isn’t naivete. It’s what keeps us in the fight.

I don’t know what our door looks like. Maybe it’s not one door at all. Maybe it’s a thousand side doors… people doing the unglamorous work in whatever corner of this moment they can actually reach. I see it getting built every day. That’s what I mean when I say I believe the door is there.

So hold onto it. Not because it’s guaranteed. Because letting go guarantees the opposite. The purgatory is real. So is the work. And somewhere, even if none of us can see it yet, so is the door.

And maybe that’s enough to breathe some life back into this timeline.

Stay curious (and hopeful),

Unbiased Science