Coronavirus is a big challenge: Tell us how you’re coping

My father told me the other day on the phone that he’d never seen anything like what was happening in America before. “Not in my lifetime,” he said.

Well, pops is 91 and as I told him, “that’s a very long time indeed.”

This week has been disorienting on the Opinion desk, with our editors and writers spread out in semiisolation working from home. I bet you can relate.

But helping lead our team as each day the realization of just how big a challenge the novel coronavirus is posing to our health, our economy, perhaps even our way of life has meant one eye-opener after another.

As journalists, we often find our faces, and certainly our ears and eyes, pressed right up against the news — good or ill, big or small — as tightly as humanly possible.

That means we’re often among the first to hear from doctors, police, scientists, those who are ill and suffering, the business leaders worried about their disappearing revenue and intractable expenses.

That proximity to the story can take its own toll, of course, and we’ve been busy reminding each other to step back when possible, to get some sleep when you can, to eat, check in on your family and friends and basically take care of yourselves and each other.

I can only imagine the levels of stress home health attendants, physicians, nurses, bus drivers, teachers, inmates and jailers are facing these days. These and so many others.

Actually, I don’t have to only imagine. We hear from a lot of folks — through letters, calls and submitted essays — about their own lives and the way they are navigating our current situation. This week on the front page of our Outlook section we included four stories from ordinary Houstonians who shared in their own words how they are getting by.

But for all that, this story of Houston and the coronavirus is so huge, so important and frankly at times so terrifying there is no way we’ve been able to hear about all the ways the virus has turned your lives inside out.

Toward that end, I’d like to invite all our readers to send us a small essay — call it a letter if you like — about how you’re coping. What is keeping you up at night?

What is helping you sleep? What changes has this meant for you and your family? Are you getting the help you need? In short: what’s on your mind?

You can send an email to viewpoints@chron.com and include COPING in the subject line. Or you can use our letters form online: https://www.houstonchronicle.com /opinion/submit.

We’d like to print as many of them as we can, so please keep them under 200 words. Include your name, address and a phone number and email so we can get in touch if needed.

Be safe, everyone.