Lockdown? I've got this, I thought. But COVID-19 is lonely, even for loners like me.

Over the years, I’ve had some bad breakups. One came in the middle of a couples therapy session. One required me to fly to Atlanta to end things, where the discount flight schedule left me stuck in my ex’s home for the remainder of a very awkward weekend. And one relationship ended silently, with a fed-up boyfriend handing me a book titled “The Misanthrope.” I didn’t realize what happened until I looked it up:  “Mis·an·thrope — a person who dislikes humankind and avoids human society.” It hurt, but I could not dispute its accuracy.

And so, when coronavirus introduced the word “lockdown” to a disbelieving American public earlier this year, I thought, I’ve got this. I’ve only ever had a small group of friends. When I left the Justice Department to represent poor people charged with crimes, I was jettisoned by two friends who remained federal prosecutors. And I let a third go when Donald Trump ascended to the presidency and our political distance became a canyon we could not bridge. It wasn’t like I had a lot of social contacts that I’d miss.    

Stay-at-home guidelines conjured a fantasy of completed home renovation projects, Zoom classes in which I became a master chef, and reading classic literature late into the night next to a crackling fire — despite the fact that I have no fireplace.

Desperate for human contact

The reality has been something altogether different. It includes: A trip to Home Depot for wall-patch spackle to fix my “renovations”; lots of baking that left me convinced a seamstress broke into my house and reduced the waists of all my pants by two inches; and not a book opened, but an eager countdown to each new episode of “The Real Housewives.”

I was okay for a while; probably longer than most. But I live alone and as weeks turned into months, and months turned into the better part of a year, I began to wonder: Is there really a "human condition," that only allows us to be happy when we’re interacting with one another?

I’ve spent the better part of my life living in my own mind and working to disprove the idea that I’m dependent on anyone, so I was resistant to the idea. If astronauts can live on a space station, and researchers can be parachuted onto the North Pole for years at a time, surely I can make it through a pandemic lockdown in my own home.

The first sign of a crack in my fortitude came when I asked a friend if he wanted to start walking a few miles each evening. I work out regularly to satisfy my vanity, but I don’t walk unless absolutely necessary. The joke among those closest to me is that the only way to get me to an amusement park is by promising to rent me an electric scooter. But walk I did.

Since then, things have gotten progressively worse. I recently asked a neighbor to meet me at a hamburger stand because there’s an abandoned picnic table nearby where we could eat in the safety of outdoor ventilation — never mind the 38-degree weather that coagulated the grease on my fries, making the calories hardly worth it.

But I knew I’d officially become desperate for human contact when I began looking forward to chatting with the grocery checkout clerks on my weekly foray for food. On one trip I got into a dispute about the efficacy of face masks with a cashier. Things took an especially pathetic turn when I asked him for his email address and sent him the recent Lancet column that explained how important masks are to stopping the spread of COVID-19. 

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Weeks passed with no reply. I thought we had something special, but apparently I was just one of hundreds of shoppers with whom this cashier made small talk as he rang up bottles of hand sanitizer, tubes of disinfecting wipes, and bundles of hoarded toilet paper.

It’s not just the lack of face-to-face communication; it’s the madness that sets in when you rarely leave your house and you’ve finished counting the electrical outlets. The mental surrender is gradual. Most recently, I’ve decided to abandon personal grooming and house cleaning. When you think about it, isn’t flossing every day a bit excessive? And why did it take a viral pandemic for me to discover the pleasure of drawing stick figures in the dust that collects on the edge of my kitchen floor?

I'm trying to resist holiday parties

Despite my body and mind turning to mush over the last nine months, I’ve not lost my ability to feel anger. So, when news broke that it’s going to take up to six months to secure enough coronavirus vaccine for all Americans, and President Donald Trump turned down an offer from one manufacturer to purchase additional vaccine, I considered crafting a Trump voodoo doll out of dust and dental floss.

Now that two vaccines are rolling out, I’m obsessing over who gets them first. Of course the elderly and health care workers should be at the head of the line. But I’m not happy about articles that predict the wealthy and well-connected will find a way to get themselves inoculated before ordinary Americans. I’m going to be really ticked off if Trump’s final executive order directs the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to designate the Kardashians as essential workers.

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I’ve written columns railing against people who rail against complying with COVID safety guidelines. But I understand their anger. It’s one thing to turn down movie night with friends because you’re a homebody. It’s quite another to have no choice — to have your governor threaten to throw you in jail for stepping outside your house. 

Yes, I appreciate that the restrictions are designed to protect me and my community. But COVID fatigue is real, and I’m a man on the edge. Had my mother smoked one more cigarette during her 1960 pregnancy, causing the slightest defect of my DNA helix, I might have ended up marching on Michigan’s Capitol with an AK-47 strapped to my chest and a surgical mask defiantly strapped to the back of my head.

We’re in the home stretch. Walgreens and CVS are already advertising that they will be administering COVID-19 vaccines. But every minute between today, and the day my number is called in the vaccine lottery, is a battle to maintain my precarious grip on sanity and not do something stupid — like go to one of the many holiday parties in my neighborhood where people are pretending it’s 2019.

My family has made the hard decision that for the first time in 49 years we will not be spending New Year’s Eve with friends we met when my dad was stationed on Barksdale Air Force base in Louisiana. 

And I’ve come to accept what I’ve refused to acknowledge until now: COVID is lonely … even for loners like me.

Michael J. Stern, a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors, was a federal prosecutor for 25 years in Detroit and Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter:  @MichaelJStern1