How to navigate your desires during COVID-19

a guide for mapping risk and reward

Jacob Watson
9 min readSep 21, 2020

It would be simplest just to stay home

Like many of you, I am struggling. In March, when the U.S. government declared a state of emergency and closed all non-essential businesses, the directions were clear enough: stay home, go to the grocery store when you have to, wash your hands, and don’t socialize with anyone outside your household.

In the intervening six months, a lot has changed. Regulations have relaxed, businesses have re-opened, and public health experts have continued to modify their guidance for which activities carry the highest risk. And yet, until the pandemic has been brought fully under control, there will continue to be some risk inherent in whatever we do.

This can be confusing. I’ve seen some people react by throwing caution to the wind, embracing all their usual routines and habits. (This is a common response to cognitive overload — when your brain can’t cope with the onslaught of new and often contradictory information.) I’ve seen others swing in the opposite direction: only leaving their homes when absolutely necessary and avoiding virtually all other people. For myself, I’ve been living somewhere in the middle, with a definite skew toward cautiousness. (I might be a 2 on Dr. Evelyn Dacker’s “COVID CARE Scale.”)

Indeed, it would be simplest to live our lives like we did back in late March. As with sex, the safest thing is just not to have it. But most of us wouldn’t be happy or healthy living like that for too long. As I see it, the problem (for me, and for many others I’ve spoken to) is two-fold:

  1. There are activities I want to participate in that carry risk. Some of these have acceptable levels of risk for me and others don’t. My assessment of that acceptability is also changing over time, based both on the science and my own personal boundaries.
  2. Some activities carry shared risk — whether to others in my pod/bubble/container, the people I socialize with, or strangers I may encounter. It’s ultimately my responsibility to be aware of how my own choices might impact the larger public.

I spent the better part of the summer trying to reconcile these realities with my own yearnings. I tried some activities when I felt safe enough to do so and asked myself what was guiding my decisions. Was I being too careful? Too cavalier? How could I make sure that any risks I took on truly aligned with my desires for how I wanted to experience life right now?

What I came up with was a tool that I hope will be useful in guiding decision-making around what acceptable risk looks like — both for you and for the people around you.

Guiding principles and inspirations

Who am I, and why am I making COVID planning tools?

Briefly: I am a theatre artist, researcher, and educator. I’m interested in how creative tools can create new possibilities and open up new ways of thinking.

I have also worked with an organization called the Illinois Caucus for Adolescent Health, developing and implementing theatre-based approaches to sexuality education. Just as healthy sexual behavior requires consideration of risk, boundaries, consent, and prevention measures, socializing during a pandemic requires us to be open and vulnerable about a complicated and personal topic.

In creating this tool, I have drawn on the principles of sex-positivity and harm reduction, which operate from the believe that sex is natural and meant to be enjoyed, but requires thoughtfulness around how we are taking care of ourselves and each other. This tool also takes inspiration from the concept of desire mapping, which was popularized by Danielle LaPorte.

The COVID-Times Desire Map

The COVID-Times Desire Map is a free, 4-page worksheet that helps you articulate and practice your own boundaries in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. It can be downloaded in full on my website and printed out for personal use.

In this post, I will guide you through the process of using the tool and how you might start to think about some of the categories it offers for making sense of your own desires. The steps are roughly in order, though you may end up backtracking and adding information as it occurs to you. There’s no wrong way to use the worksheet.

Step 1. Figure out what matters to you

To begin, I recommend you get clear on two big things:

  • Your desires: the feelings, sensations, and needs you have. Maybe you really miss being in nature, or seeing a certain person. Maybe you are longing for a certain kind of physical activity, but could do without others. This is the place to get specific about how your intentions will shape the choices you make.
  • Your limitations: the factors that get in the way of fulfilling these desires. Some factors could be situational (an elderly parent, an essential job) or emotional (fear of getting sick). Any limitations you can identify are valid. By naming your limitations, you are working to ensure that your choices minimize potential for harm to yourself or others.

Step 2. Figure out WHO matters to you

Next, you’ll have to think about your network, the people you interact with — either voluntarily or by necessity. Your network includes everyone from the people you live with, to co-workers you might encounter, to friends and neighbors. (Note: since brief interactions are generally low risk, I wouldn’t recommend including people like grocery store workers or shopkeepers — unless you happen to be spending long periods of time socializing with them.)

Remember that your network includes not just the people you interact with, but the people they interact with, too. So, for example, if I spend time with a friend who also visits her mother regularly (and without significant precautions), my friend’s mother should be on my network map.

Step 3. Name what you’re already doing

The next step is to create what I call a risk résumé, or risk profile. Basically, it’s a summary of where you might have already taken certain risks that would carry over into any new interactions. When you create this list, focus in particular on anything that tends to occur regularly, or that happened within the last two weeks (the incubation period for COVID-19).

Think through everything that might make sense to include here: that visit to the dentist, the hug with your sister. You might not think something matters, but it could. The point is to be as transparent as possible when you start having conversations with others about your relative comfort with risk.

You can rank the activities 1–10 as many popular guides have done, or more simply as low, medium, high risk. Whichever works for you is fine.

Step 4. Consider all the possibilities

This is the fun part. In this step you get to ask, “what might I want to do?” Note that the key word here is “might.” The idea isn’t that you make a big list of activities that you are definitely ready to jump into. On the contrary: since the tool is meant to be used with others, this is your chance to express hesitance, unsurity.

One of the biggest obstacles to making decisions is feeling like we have to know the answer right away. But sometimes we need to consider something for a bit, or do some more research or planning, before we’re ready to say yes or no.

So, talk with the people in your network. What do they want to do? How do you feel about those activities? This is the place to name activities that others may have invited you to do that you’re unsure about. For instance, my mom has a friend who frequently hosts others to drink wine in her backyard, at a distance. My mom has been invited to join but isn’t sure if she’s comfortable sharing space in that way. So, she could list it here as a “maybe.” Sometimes our maybes turn into nos, and that’s fine. But I’ve had a few maybes — like attending a protest or eating on a patio — that have turned into yeses under the right circumstances.

This step borrows from boundary and kink planning strategies in the sex ed world. By listing out everything you could try and marking them with “yes,” “no,” or “maybe,” you are giving both yourself and your partners a chance to express desires and boundaries alike. Again, you can rate risk on a scale of 1–10, or using low, medium, high.

Step 5. Self-reflect

Once you’ve written out everything you think you might want to consider doing, take a look at your interest ratings. Then, look back at your desires. Do an assessment: ask yourself, do my activities line up with my core desires?

This step is small, but mighty. So often we commit to activities that don’t actually feed us, either out of social pressure, or habit, or because they seem like the things we should want. In this step, forget should. Ask yourself, what is really and truly worth the risk right now? And how much am I comfortable taking on at this moment? — knowing it can always change.

Step 6. Share and compare

Once you know how you feel about all the options, you’re ready to talk to your people about them. Many folks start with this step and, I think, end up overwhelmed by how challenging it can be to sort out your own preferences from the influences of your social circles. So, really make sure you’ve done some internal work before starting this conversation. That way, you’ll show up ready to advocate for your own desires and set boundaries where you need to.

MIT’s Technology Review has a great primer on what to keep in mind when having a “pandemic bubble” conversation, much of which I think applies anytime you are talking about how you want to share space with others during COVID. Below are some additional conversation starters to help you begin the discussion:

Remember also to listen. Understand that it’s really not possible to be rational in this time. Everything is ambiguous and we shouldn’t begrudge anyone else their preferences, as long as they are not causing avoidable harm to others.

A friend of mine shared with me that she saw a Tweet along the lines of, “anyone who is taking more risks than me is reckless; anyone who is being more careful is neurotic.” Do your best to avoid this tempting — but unfair — binary.

Step 7. Make a plan

Finally, once you know what it is you want to do, think about how you will manage risk. Having a plan means you are prioritizing the safety of your group or pod. (Remember that while a number of you may have agreed to a certain set of terms, others outside your pod have not. So make sure to mask up when around strangers!)

This step was critical for me when I was planning a small vacation with two friends in Michigan. We knew we wanted to spend some time together by the lake without having to worry about distancing from one another. But because we were going to be combining three different households, we had to talk about our individual safety practices in the weeks leading up to our trip: who else had we seen in the last two weeks? And what exactly was everyone’s definition of “self-isolating”?

An important decision we made was to all go get tested for COVID a few days before our departure date (luckily, this can now be done for free in Chicago, where I live). If any one of us got a positive result, the trip was off. Luckily, it all worked out and we were able to safely enjoy shared time by a beautiful lake.

And that’s it! Congratulations. You made it through the whole tool. Was this useful for you? Did it spark a new discovery or open up a possible activity for you? If so, drop me a comment below.

Once again, here’s the link to download a blank template of the full tool from my website.

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Jacob Watson
Jacob Watson

Written by Jacob Watson

Artist, teacher, performer, designer, maker of interesting things. Ed.M. and researcher on art + learning + public life. www.jacobcwatson.com. T: @jacobcwatson

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