I had invalid fantasies long before COVID-19.
While this pandemic was far from a “dream come true” for me, I did not suffer from social distancing the way other people did. Staying away from people didn’t feel like a hardship for me; instead it was an excuse to hunker down in the hermit mode I almost always crave that is normally not socially-permissible. The way so many people behaved (badly) in response to the emergency made me want to steer clear of humans even more than I did before these years of deathly coronavirus disease and stay-at-home orders.
Let me be clear; I absolutely did not want to get infected with C-19. As much as I fantasize about being sick, contracting a life-threatening illness is not a GOAL I want to achieve.
I do not actually want to be an invalid. What I want, or what I *fantasize* about, is being *treated* like a sick person who is entitled, at the very least, to sleep a lot in a room alone. To be cared for quietly, nursed, and healed … or left alone. To be prescribed medicine. To be denied nothing. To not be judged for being tired … capable of doing little else than reading or perhaps scrawling their last will and testament. Confessing and being forgiven for long-held secret trespasses.
I am interested in sickness(es) and the symptoms of illness as fetish (adjacent to medical fetish stuff, maybe, but as their own things).
While I’ve wanted to dive into my invalid fantasies for decades, in the wake of coronavirus I’m curious how many fetishists were “born”. How many people have come to eroticize care-taking a sick family member, for example, or who now find being soothed and tended themselves triggers arousal.
The coughing. The labored breathing. The oxygen tanks. The medicine. The confusion. The sponge baths. The vulnerability. The fear. The privacy.
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