The COVID Wall And What’s Next
A surprising amount of information about blue whales, & also some singing from the wreckage
A lot of articles right now are talking about how people are “hitting the covid wall” or “hitting the quarantine wall,” which, yes. Something like that. But it would be more accurate (if wordier) to say something like “outstripping the ability of our limited capacity as humans to defer reacting to and processing trauma.” I suppose that isn’t a snappy headline.
Here’s the thing. We’ve all been doing triage in the sociopolitical equivalent of a hospital under bombardment for four straight years, no? That’s the closest I can get to what being alive under Trump in America felt like. And at the very moment we saw the point at which that might end, the people we were in the trenches with started dropping dead.
When the pandemic started, we were there already working with the metaphorical equivalent of a coding patient and 36 hours of no sleep; our hands were full as we watched people we loved — or at least people we knew, people who seemed permanent and reasonably well and solid as recently as yesterday — start dying.
Our hands were full and the bombs were still dropping, but now the fragile web of souls who had been holding us up began breaking as light after light went out, and none of us could do anything to help. Oh: all the while, we also knew we might be next.
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Trauma experts talk about the three F’s of trauma events, the three (or four, there’s disagreement) reactions people can have in reaction to a life-threatening or terrifying or deeply sad experience in the moment it happens:
Fight. Flight. Freeze.
We no more choose which reaction we’ll have to a particular trauma than we choose our eye color or how tall we are. It’s wired in, some combination of genetics and early nurture, and any trauma expert will tell you there is no “right” or “best” reaction to trauma, that all reactions are valid. Very true.
I sometimes think, though, that the hardest reaction for trauma survivors to cope with afterwards might be Freeze, that this reaction, which one doesn’t choose and can’t control, leaves survivors feeling the most powerless, the most guilty, the most vulnerable to future terrors.
Freeze is the state of enduring the trauma, perhaps even pretending it’s not happening, then or later. Freeze is being in the presence of violence while voiceless and paralyzed.
Freeze is often the right response. People who freeze do so because their neurology has taken its very smartest instant read of the situation and concluded that playing dead nets our best chance at surviving what is happening to us.
But your mind doesn’t freeze, and your memory doesn’t. You keep thinking. Mercilessly, your memory keeps recording. And because we live in a culture that prizes individual agency and despises human fragility, considers it a weakness instead of the strength and necessity it is, later, we castigate ourselves. Why didn’t we fight? Why didn’t we leave?
Trauma often feels like our fault. It isn’t, but we are primed to pull lessons from our bad experiences, a survival trait that turns on us when there are no lessons, when the Bad Thing is an offense committed against us, or is a set of circumstances set off by powers so remote from us that we can’t even see them from where we stand. In those situations, there was nothing we could have done to stop the trauma event, and so no lesson to learn; and our traitor brains respond to that by never giving up the hunt for the “I should’ve” that would have saved us, that could save us next time.
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Our pandemic and subsequent quarantine came after three years of helplessness: our government turned on its citizens and a madman was elevated to a position of appalling power; children were put in freezing jails to die of malnutrition and influenza while hard-won reforms and rights for our most vulnerable citizens were stripped away as if the cruelty was the point (because it was).
The pandemic arrived when we were already exhausted, and its mechanisms and causes and levers were so far from our reach that we could no more turn it aside than we could an eighteen wheeler with burnt-out brakes, flying down a mountain pass to total anything below.
It arrived, and all we could do is freeze. Play dead. Hope the angel of death passed our doorway. Know it wouldn’t pass everyone’s.
Freezing in a trauma event can keep us safe, that moment. That hour. That night. When it is over, we begin reckoning with the existential cost of facing our helplessness. Our fragility.
We begin that next hour, or day, or maybe we put it off six weeks, a couple of months, if we are especially good at dissociation and denial. (Personally, I’m a champ. I once put off a nervous breakdown for six months! Then I went to the hospital. I don’t really recommend this approach.) But anyway, the reckoning begins, then. We can’t wall it off forever. Things begin shaking loose inside. Our inner fault lines have been subjected to intolerable pressures; structures are going to fall. Parts of us are going to perish, go under in fire and rubble and have to be rebuilt.
Except in COVID, of course, we didn’t begin the reckoning in a few days or months. We froze, because freezing was all we could do, and then we did it some more. “Wear a mask. Try not to go places. Don’t touch your face.” Doing nothing was all we could contribute. The neurology of our scientific community read the situation and told us truthfully immobility was our best chance at surviving and helping others survive.
We also pretended, as a culture, that being frozen was normal; we pretended it was all right the way a trauma survivor will sometimes lie to themselves in the moment, because the injury of seeing what is happening to them on top of the injury of its happening is too unbearable to feel all at once.
We went to school and then didn’t, we went to our offices and then didn’t, we Tried To Make The Best Of It, we were expected to assign or earn grades and we did so, to perform work in alignment with non-quarantine standards and we did so; we picked up our groceries at the curb, we touched no one, we did not touch even our own faces.
We quarantined ourselves from the virus, then ourselves from each other, then ourselves from ourselves.
We did that, THAT, for a YEAR.
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What you’re feeling — you’re not “hitting a wall,” you’re not bored, or frustrated, or tired. I mean, yes. Those things too. Of course.
But also, it’s more, and if it feels bigger than that, less like a small dip in your ability to Keep Calm & Carry On — if it feels more like seeing what you thought was a dolphin’s fin slicing out of the water near your little dinghy only to realize it’s the flipper of an entire fricking blue whale that is now emerging, monster-of-the-deep style, directly under you and all around you — the, you know, dark hide of the pelagic zone’s hadal depths rising, embodied, to displace your every certainty and flip you right the fuck out of the last architectures holding you afloat above the Big Nothing... well, I mean, YES. It is also THAT.
The chirpy articles (“Seven Ways To Reset When You’ve Hit The Wall!”) — I’m glad they’re giving words to what people are feeling. But too many of them are treating those feelings as a little blip, a rest stop on the way to renewed productivity via a plan to drink more water and finally download that mindfulness app.
I think for most of us, it’s more than that. It’s trauma. We are hitting the point where we can’t mash down our reactions to years of terror followed by a crisis in which helplessness and immobility was all we could offer.
The whale is under all of us. We see it. You are not imagining monsters, and you are not just a little tired. We are oarless and adrift, and the barnacle-starred vast flank of every way we’ve gritted our teeth into an approximate smile this last year is rising.
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I really think we need to let it tip the boat over.
Fighting this is, I think, not one of our options. I suspect we need to take out our calendars and cross off approximately 80% of the things we tell ourselves we have to do and make a plan to dedicate a lot of that time to hiding in the closet sitting on our shoes, crying, and eating the box of emergency cookies we have concealed from our children in the dark to recover.
We should pencil in “set up a Zoom appointment with a therapist so I can stop waking up at four in the morning in a panic sweat.”
Or “look up the photos of the victims of COVID and acknowledge their loss so I can stop clenching my jaw until my neck hurts and my neck until my shoulders hurt.”
And we should definitely pencil in “stop looking for the fucking silver lining and be brave enough — un-American enough — honest enough — to stop bright-siding mass casualty, existential terror, rage, helplessness, and grief.”
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One thing I keep learning about trauma (and forgetting, and re-re-learning, because I am Bad At Having Feelings) and about acknowledging it and the feelings that come out of it, is that going ahead and experiencing the stored emotions of trauma is not the extinction-level event I always unconsciously fear it will be. It is not the Destroyer of Productivity, Consumer Of Energies Needed For Day-To-Day Living (First Of Its Name, etc.). What actually takes a lot of time and energy is pretending that shit doesn’t exist.
There is this one bit from Hannah Gadsby’s 2020 special DOUGLAS that I love for so many reasons. I’m going to relay a smidgen of it here:
“Now, I want to tell you a story about a terrible conversation I had at the dog park once. This bloke just walks up to me. I mean, he had a dog. He wasn’t just being creepy. He had context. [...] It’s not pertinent to the story, but I want you to know: His dog had shoes on. And his dog did not want to have shoes on. [...] it’s not important to the story, but it was a lot in my periphery, so I just want you to know. Added stress. Now, this was my, uh, friend’s icebreaker. We’d never met. This was his icebreaker. He said, ‘Did you know… it takes less muscles to smile than frown?’ The men in the audience are sitting there going, ‘Oh, you’ve experienced an isolated incident.’ And the women are sitting there going, ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake.’ [...] Basically what he’s saying is, ‘Your face is wrong. Can you change it?’ Like, honestly. And even if I gave him the benefit of the doubt, right, and truly believed that energy consumption was his chief concern… [...] even if I believed that, the thing is, I was neither smiling nor frowning. My face was neutral, which takes fuck all muscles.”
She goes on to tell a story about... okay, it’s impossible to characterize, and you should just watch the special (immediately, if not sooner, because she is possibly the funniest and smartest living human there is) but the reason I thought of this bit right now is that some asshole ordered her to smile, told her to stop frowning, and she WASN’T EVEN FROWNING. She was just being neutral. The Powers That Be, in the person of Dog Park Guy, read a neutral face as willful obstruction of Things Going Smoothly, and if that isn’t what it’s like to be a woman every goddamn day, and a person in a pandemic at this particular moment in America as well, I don’t know what is.
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So, America. We hold certain truths to be self-evident here, such as that being strong is mandatory, and being strong means being positive, and being positive isn’t just keeping going, which we deem insufficient somehow, it is about OPTIMIZING and DOING MORE and making sure you do all that more with an orthodontically spotless smile, because it’s our job not just to be, but to pay for that being with making things nice, to not commit the Thought Crime of sadness, and to never, ever, ever let anyone believe you might be weak.
I just want to know how many fucking muscles that takes, and I want to know why anyone would think that is a human kind of existence. If there is a corollary to the Rising Kraken Of National Fear & Grief, a twin, a second beast, it is, for me, my rage at a way of life that left each of us being asked this long not only to keep going — not that part, that was simply necessary — but to do it while pretending we were fine and nothing had really changed.
Sometimes in a trauma event the reason a survivor pretends nothing is happening is because what they are experiencing is such a shock. But sometimes, I think we pretend nothing is happening because we have no language to describe the reality we are experiencing. The language hasn’t been invented yet, or more often, the language has been repressed.
Saying what is real is often inconvenient to people, and the more people benefit from the status quo — the more powerful they are, that is — the more inconvenient they are likely to find it. After all, the status quo is a reality we all agree to inhabit together, and it involves not seeing things that might throw a wrench in the works of what serves the powerful.
I think that’s why our conversation around the bone-level weariness and brokenness we are beginning to feel is happening mostly in terms of peppy Life Hacks(TM). Admitting we have been asked to perform inhumanly while being denied even the language to describe that performance is apt to disrupt the smooth functioning of It’s Always Been This Way and its comforting myth about bootstraps (up-pulling of self via), control, and the benevolence of late capitalism.
But who are we comforting? And whom does this performance serve? How much is it costing us, and how much less might the truth cost?
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Let it tip over.
Whales are terrifying, aren’t they? They go on forever compared to us, acres of body, slippery blue-black skin like a live, flexing rind made of crush depth. But blue whales, the largest, eat krill. They won’t devour us; they just make the smooth surface uneasy in the churn of their own wake.
I’m not sure what will happen if we start telling the truth. If we stop struggling to seem like we’ve got perfect control of our little boat. Can we do that forever, though? Would anyone want to? Who are we bailing out when we try?
What would happen if we named what we feel rushing toward us, and followed it into the untreaded depths? I bet it’s quiet down there. I bet there is not a single fucking life hack. In extremity, at the edges of survival, a lot of clutter falls away, don’t you think? There isn’t room. Breathing takes all the words and mind you have. Taking the next step is of unspeakable interest and effort.
Facing and processing a trauma is like that. It consumes. But you’re not in the belly of the whale; you’re in the presence of it, that’s all, and it is enormous, a black and breathing cathedral of all the forces bigger than us. You can let it chase you. You can stay on the surface and say the churn of its breaching is just a wave. I guess you can.
But what if we just let that wake break open all the rickety half-repaired make-do we’ve been living in for a year? For four years? For longer than that, if we’re honest about the ways we’ve gradually watched the things we trusted about our systems of government and finance and society and self erode, or discovered how many of them were always rotten to the roots and we didn’t even know it.
“Normal,” the thing we’ve been pretending things are this last year, wasn’t that great, to be honest. It was already killing a lot of people and hurting most of the rest us. It already had no room for error, for difference, for a job loss, a health crisis, a hard day, a short paycheck, a sick kid.
What if we stopped pretending things are normal, and also stopped pretending that normal was actually any good?
I think we are all headed into the deep water anyway. The wall is coming. I don’t think we have a choice about that.
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I have blown up my own life a couple of times now. Each time, it was an occasion of deep wretchedness and grief. I won’t lie about that. I mean, of course it was.
But there is a moment, after you are done with the wringing-out of grieving, when you are strangely empty and at peace. The way back is closed; the intermission of being wrecked by acknowledging that is almost over. And in that interstice between that last thing and what comes next, you lay your hands on the levers of your core identity, the tools that shape the whole direction of your life, and you realize that in the wreckage there is also the power to build anything to replace it that you can imagine, that there is nothing there to say no even to the ways of being that are so richly captivating to you that you have not allowed yourself to think of them.
When things are in ruins, when we are adrift, there is a choice about how we recover. Do we patch together an approximation of what was never working all that well to begin with? That’s an option, on the other side of the grieving: remake what was there, down to the very last micromanaged, high-deductible-plan job and border patrol checkpoint and police station and vocabulary structure and self. We can do that.
Or we could look at the strangely hopeful sprawl of nothingness in front of us now, the way being knocked off center in acres of loss has razed us personally, socially, structurally, and we could grab the courage to actually build everything we thought we couldn’t have.