I realized today that part of my anxiety is that this crisis brings all my food insecurity issues back. There were times as a child and as a college student that I didn’t have enough to eat, and didn’t know where my next meal would come from. I remember trying to stretch a bag of potatoes to last a month. I got jobs where I could eat — a taco place at lunchtime and a pizza place on the weekends. But still, there was that haunting fear of “what if I can’t afford to eat tomorrow? Next week?”

So I’m going to use that realization and donate to our local food bank. I’m grateful and blessed to be fortunate enough to not worry about how I’ll eat now, but those memories never, ever go away. Or the shame of people making horrible comments about the contents of our grocery cart when my mom had to get food stamps to help us out. If you’ve never experienced it, let me tell you that shame tastes like rusty nails in the back of your throat.