Speak, Solipsist (002) : Rapid Reintegration
Not sure who needs to hear this, but the pandemic is not over
“When we go back home we will find ourselves in the richness and beauty of our old lives on one hand, but always carrying Concordia in the other. Torn apart between two worlds, each with its own treasures, and the combination of which is only understood by you…”
-Stijn Thoolen
Two claims for your consideration, one of which is true and one of which isn’t :
1) people are lemmings
2) the pandemic is over
How myopic and disrespectful it would be to call covid a thing of the past when the global rates are higher than they’ve ever been. It would be like China saying something to this effect thirteen months ago. Of course, no one is saying this outwardly, but I can’t help but feel like we’re all undergoing a collective repression lately, sweeping the pandemic into the sands of time. Choosing to forget the last year happened at all, like some vast temporal ravine with 2019 on one side and 2021 on the other, and only a foggy fever dream where the middle should be.
Have we been just so battered that we don’t have the capacity to reflect ? Or are we stupefied by the flowers blooming outside the windows we’ve been confined to all this time ?
People who intentionally spend prolonged time in isolated, confined, and extreme environments, like Antarctic researchers, zealously reflect on their experiences (this link leads to the final blog post Stijn Thoolen, a European Space Agency doctor and one-time guest speaker in my favorite Harvard class on human behavior in outer space, posted from his year in Antarctica). My own inclination is to ruminate to death over the events in my life, good and bad, perhaps out of a writer’s desire to milk meaning from them. I obsessively documented my earliest days of the pandemic because I hoped they would have something to tell me later on.
Many of my friends had the same hopes, intending to reflect on how last year altered them, only they haven’t actually done it yet. I’m not sure why. The City of Boston is lifting its mask mandate effective today, and I’m a weekend away from my post-vax freedom date - now that warm weather has returned and the world is opening up, maybe it feels like an unnecessary chore. Or maybe, in trying to compress the activities of two years into one, it’s simply hard to find the time. I can understand that – I'm out of school for the summer, and yet between working, reading for my thesis, juggling writing projects, moving in with my partner, and planning friend trips and professional trips and partner trips, it feels as though all of my moments until the end of the year are already earmarked.
It’s hard to escape the mind games. I feel like I just woke up one day in a spinoff of my own life, and sometimes when I remember certain things (like that the café closed down or that I have a boyfriend now) they feel completely fabricated. No one came out of this unscathed without some such kind of cognitive distortion – but we are resilient people, and now that it appears the worst is behind us, we are more preoccupied with rebuilding. Larry and I were taking a walk along Mystic River and I said it felt like our relationship was like dandelions springing out of a sidewalk crack.
Here is what it all looked like for me. In March 2020 : panic. Nothing but noxious, viscous panic. Nothing but elevated heart rate and thought spirals. In April and May, I dove inward and found a profound, unexpected joy. When I think of quarantine I am reminded of jump roping with Caroline in Hobart Park on chilly mornings, assembling jigsaw puzzles on the living room hardwood while half-listening to work meetings, taking Chris’s shitty mountain bike to a bench under a shady tree and unraveling my new novel in a yellow notebook with After Hours on repeat. Terrifying days, but blissful.
June and July were humid and miserable. Every month since the beginning of the year, another one of my close friends would leave Boston in a single-file line, and by summer, I felt like I had no one left. I started waking up before the sunrise to commute into the new luxe office in Seaport on the reduced bus schedule, and aside from putting on a smile for work and school I was mostly too exhausted to even get out of bed. I was see-through and hollow.
In contrast, August, September, and October were golden. I took a trip to the Cape in hopes that it would reset my mind, and writing alone by the beach, driving by Kurt Vonnegut’s white corner house in Barnstable, and walking the causeway in Provincetown with Rachel and Ben did just that. The week after I returned, I started talking to a guy on Hinge who had a “truth over happiness” policy – I liked the sound of that, and upon meeting him, promptly fell in love. I was accepted into a research lab I’d been trying to get into for six years. Tay and I took a trip to work on our novels in a sweet, secluded little cabin in Mohegan Lake, New York right after my birthday. I remember remarking to Larry one evening on his balcony not long after that it felt like I had everything I could ever want.
From November to April we hibernated inside a white box. We stepped into the new year full on gnocchi and strip steak and freshly officially in love with each other. Aside from various conversations and activities taking place on various-sized screens, I don’t remember a whole lot else.
Now we are in a period of rapid reintegration. Several of my friends who’d lost their jobs during the pandemic have started new ones in the past few weeks. Fifty-one percent of Massachusetts is fully vaccinated. I have five trips planned for the next six months. With this comes, once again, sheer panic, but this time I find myself wanting to swim against the tide of unquestioningly reverting to the life I knew before. The pandemic is not over, so we are not off the hook to cease thinking about it just yet. What’s floating in this swirling nonsense for me to grab hold of and steady myself ?
1) Happiness is a Package Deal - somehow, in the midst of a worldwide crisis, I managed to have a pretty good year. And somehow, even when I was at my happiest, my happiness was served with a platter of complicated feelings including guilt, disbelief, stress, frustration, even grief. At first even I had forgotten that it’s possible to carry all these emotions at once, but it’s part of being human.
2) What a Blessing This Boredom Is – I actually romanticize early quarantine because it gave me the generous gift of free time. I could focus with pointed fixation on my novel or workout regimen not because these things were chores, but because they were the healing escape from the burdens of work, school, and isolation. My days had, maybe for the first time, abundant supply of rest, play, and joy to offset the work. I knew I might never have an opportunity like this again – but I can, if I only choose to.
3) Claim the Lost Year – although most of us felt our lives grind to a halt, life never actually stopped. Time kept passing. Everyone was affected in some way; not one person failed to develop a schema of thoughts and experiences around it. Some people even went through massive life changes, and it wouldn’t be fair to them to ignore the dandelions in the sidewalk cracks. As destructive as it was, it was also generative. And if you are open to observing the world around you, even if it appears as though nothing is happening, the universe will always have a story to tell.
Watching : Operation Varsity Blues • Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist • Love, Death, & Robots
Reading : Stumbling on Happiness (Dan Gilbert) • The Smarter Screen (Shlomo Benartzi) • Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents (Lindsay Gibson)
Listening : Euphoric Sad Songs (RAYE) • “Old Love / New Love” (Twin Shadow)