It is testament to the inertia of these times of COVID that I have written so little in the last year. This lack of drive has affected much of my life and has been experienced alonside a similarly distracting and forced busyness that has also been impossible to ignore. This duality, of activity and inactivity, of impotence and constancy, has thread its way through the last year, a year of balancing home-schooling, full-time work and my own independent working while simultaneously being slave to necessary authoritarianism. It has been an everything-and-nothing year, of excess (paternalism, stimulus, work, exhausting responsibility) and of cessation (autonomy, human contact, personal growth, creativity), a year of intense nothingness, a year of waiting for what comes next when what comes next is that nothing comes next.
It has also been a year of persistent change and some of those changes have been forced upen me contributing to a sense of disconnectedness and distance. How can any self-governance remain in place when massive authorities insist by rule of undemocratic law, and when tiny viruses insist by rule of tranmissability, that I cannot go there because it is too far? And that I cannot go there because it is too near, that I must exercise my son's brain through academic study for 6 hours a day but I must not take him outside for more than one hour to exercise his body?
This excess of change brings about a listlessness- if everything changes all the time we get used to it and our default setting is identified as persistent instability. Why focus on the newness we are presented with if the new newness is just around the corner? Why should I get accustomed to what we are now told is expected of us if this becomes outdated tomorrow? It has been too easy to disconnect, to disassociate myself from others and from my community.
In 2020, many people, including me, felt this constant inconstancy. In my field of mental health I would often see clients who have developed personality disorders, a persistent and pervasive lifelong problem caused by a combination of genetic factors and their environment as their personality was, literally, forming. One of the most negatively influential environmental factors that children can experience, one often known by adults with a personality disorder, is a lack of consistancy and stability. Constant change (such as unpredictable behaviours of influential adults) can often have a detrimental effect on the developing personality of a young person and in it's severest form can disconnect them from their (eventual adult) environment, cutting them off from normal, expected realtionships. It is this disconnect, this separateness, that has been much of my 2020.
But, in contrast, these feelings of detachment are not the same as isolation. Woven through heavy blanket after heavy blanket of heartbreak, as thousands and thousands and thousands of people die, have been tendrils of allyship, a thin but intense line bringing me closer to others, into their lives. Even if I never meet them, never know them, there are people on the news, in the paper, in conversation, whose stories I recognise. In these times of Covid I have been able to sympathise with more people, strangers really, than ever before. This woman's husband has died of Covid, that man's mother died of Covid, three generations in this family have been directly affected, these lovers cannot touch each other, this child cannot hold her mother.
I understand the loss of those I love. I know that gap, the space left behind. I now know there are millions of other people who understand much more of how I feel too, who understand more of how millions of us feel, who have been through similar and shared experiences. The gap between empathy and true understanding has closed a little, bringing me closer to others, maybe bringing all of us closer to each other, connecting us all in the most important way.
