My pandemic began on March 13th, 2020. Unbeknownst to me at the time, it was my last day on the NYC subway for months. Whispers of a city-wide shutdown abound, I boarded the downtown E train to World Trade Center for drinks with a former co-worker. Half-way though my final semester of my public health (ha.) master’s degree, I was full-speed on the job hunt and the balancing act of managing classes and a part-time job kept me largely occupied as paranoia swept through the streets around me in preceding weeks. That day, it was palpable. It was in the empty train cars, all over the eerily abandoned downtown streets, and, most vividly, in everyone’s eyes.
Over the next several days, fear drove people out of Manhattan by the hundreds of thousands. It left shelves in supermarkets empty as if war had been declared. For a brief moment, it rendered everything else meaningless. A fight with a friend came to a grinding halt and instead, became a fearful exchange of “please stay safe” texts from across the country. I, a fervent perfectionist, crossed assignments due in the next 24 hours off my to-do list. What was the point? Most significantly, I told my parents that unlike many millennials, I would not be coming to quarantine with them and my elderly grandparents. Instead, I had made the public health-informed decision to remain isolated in my Manhattan apartment with my equally anxious roommate. This was not well-received. After hurling hurtful accusations of selfishness and disrespect, my father hung up the phone. The next time he spoke to me was 2 weeks later as he wheezed his will to me over the phone while COVID and pneumonia destroyed his lungs.
My father survived, but many did not. Many have not.
In the last year, I have lost. You have lost, too. Odds are we both know someone who was killed by COVID, maybe even several someones. That loss is, of course, immeasurable and forever, but it is not the only loss. We all lost time, plans, jobs, trips, graduations, relationships, birthdays, homes, births, funerals, the list measures as long as the human experience. Amidst all this, we lost, most frustratingly, the resolve to recognize loss.
Universally, humans are averse to loss. Of course they are. Who wants to feel like they had something and suddenly don’t? The messy thing about loss is that rarely do we choose it, but rarely does that matter. It is an equal opportunity offender. Worst yet, rarely are losses a largely collective experience. Your risky stock investment does not harm me. My forgetting a ring in a public restroom does not harm you. Both experiences are siloed into neat, compartmentalized boxes in our separate emotional brains where they live forever and perhaps haunt future decisions.
The pandemic defied all lived experience. As a first for multiple generations, the pandemic emerged as the largest collective experience of multi-layered and complex trauma. It has been brutal and dauntingly on-going. Even the most confident optimists among us have emerged with frayed psyches. Multiple institutional failures, from lack of commonsense federal public policy to weak protections for workers at the small-business level to no socioemotional support for increasingly overburdened caregivers (notably women), have littered the path to the new normal we have craved since the first lockdown order was issued. We were largely powerless as hospitals filled, morgues overflowed and lives around us turned upside down. The shock of it all brought many of us to our knees. Calls to crisis hotlines and therapists shot through the roof. A shadow pandemic of mental illness began in tandem, claiming the wellness of us all. Nonetheless, bearing witness to such acute crisis brought us together in emotionally and materially meaningful ways. We held space for one another in tearful zoom calls and shared our fears in long, emotional text messages. We clapped for healthcare workers at 7pm, knowing that this nightmare was a tiered one and to be home and safe was to be privileged. We formed group chats and on-the-ground organizations to gather PPE and deliver essential supplies to health settings and vulnerable neighbors. The loss bonded us together, until it didn’t.
Tyler the Creator once joked on Twitter that cyber bullying isn’t real because one can just look away from the screen. In many respects, that is how so many of us responded to the unbearable accumulation of loss. Applause slowly turned to apathy, especially as summer crept in. Talks of vacations to “get away from it all” resumed, casual in-person dates filled parks and outdoor restaurants, and rooftop parties raged on. The confusion was palpable, even among those who seemed to care the least to adhere to the patchwork of safety guidelines available. The atmosphere suddenly shifted. Out of a Spring of unbearable fear came a Summer of socially-taboo but nonetheless widespread indifference to the pandemic.
How was such whiplash possible? The fact of the matter is continuous loss and grief are hard and heavy. This was not the average poor investment or lost jewelry. It was increasingly semi-permanent, just like Twitter. So, we looked away.
One of the most interesting things I read in the early days of lockdown was that people who regularly suffer from anxiety- and depression-related disorders were typically less distraught by the unfolding reality than those who do not. There are multiple conjectures for this. Perhaps they are simply better equipped to cope given their on-going cultivation of self-soothing skills? Perhaps they are better able to accept the current state because there is, for once, a palpable culprit on which they can pin their anxiety? Perhaps they are better able to label their emotions and thus, faster to accept them? Who’s to say?
Actually, I am. A lot of us are.
Resilience, in part, determines the degree to which one can successfully cope with crisis. It allows us to navigate difficult experiences and in best case, informs our future reactions to traumatic events. Most importantly, it varies from person to person. I am not here to insist that the people who eventually chose indifference to the pandemic lack resilience (that is a think piece for another day). Instead, I offer a look through the lens that most often colors my worldview: chronic depression.
Depression clings to my skin like a humidity I can’t rinse clean. It sets the world around me slightly out of focus, blurry around the edges and exhausting to fully perceive. It is, at best, a deep, persevering indifference to any and everything and at worst, it is a persistent ache that robs even fleeting joyous life moments of their shine. Stigmatized and yet ubiquitous, depression and related mood disorders are a leading cause of morbidity and disability around the world. The stickiest point? Depression is manageable, but it is chronic. I can never look away.
People living with chronic depression cultivate resilience in small ways every day. When appearing as the main character in your own life feels like a chemical impossibility, the simple act of making your bed is a Marathon win. Showing up to work on time? A true victory. Accomplishing tasks at work? Whew. And despite all this, people living with chronic depression carve out paths to productivity. Many are highly functional (myself included). I draw on a wide variety of resources, networks, and treatments to manage my symptoms as necessary. Given we must learn how to cope with long-term mental health burdens, is it really any wonder that pandemic destruction was ultimately something we seemed adept at managing? In many ways, the early stage of the pandemic was like the first day of a depressive episode for me. I accept it is going to happen, that I can’t make it go away, but I can make it easier for myself in small ways. When pandemic was declared, I sometimes made my favorite dessert after dinner or binged comforting shows on Netflix. Sometimes I called specific friends who I know always make me laugh. I leaned on my therapist heavily. Nothing could fix it, but some things made it bearable.
Surviving depression is a sustained act of belief in light you cannot see. I often describe my depression as a long, dark tunnel in a cave. During an episode, I find myself alone deep in the tunnel. I know which way to go sometimes because I can see the sun illuminating the exit and I know this ordeal will end. However, I know which way to go even if I can’t and don’t. This is because the fundamental truth of depression is that it is, above all, a personal experience. People who love me may come through the tunnel searching for me. They may even hold my hand, sit with me on the floor, or encourage me to join them outside. Ultimately though, they can’t move me. I won’t join them outside, until I do. This is not to say that recovering from a depressive episode is a simple choice, but it is to say that rarely, if ever, can outside forces shift the burden off your shoulders in your deepest suffering. It’s ultimately on me. The active decision to accept my reality, to seek help, and to build coping mechanisms is what empowers me to believe in my own recovery. To face depression eye-to-eye in total recognition of its power, but with confidence in its inevitable retreat is what ultimately leads us out of our caves. The only way out is through. We believe in better days, even when we can’t see them. That is resilience.
Throughout the pandemic, I believed in better days, even though I couldn’t see them. You should, too.
Given the dominant reactions to pandemic so far, I believe we have two options: emerge from the cave having remembered the long walk back or emerge from the cave having pretended we were never there in the first place. When you do the latter in chronic depression, the next episode (and there is always a next episode) is worse. Trauma compounds and suppressed emotions eventually spill out of the overstuffed cabinets in our minds. We lash out, say things we don’t mean, act in ways that are unexpected. We hurt people we love. We experience sudden fits of rage or overwhelming sadness that we cannot justify, and we find it doubly difficult to explain ourselves. Feelings are not facts, but sometimes they are powerful enough to cosplay as them. In those moments, anyone would struggle to reconcile what they perceive to be their reality with what the world around them claims.
Children around us are showing us firsthand why this matters. They are typically neither emotionally nor verbally equipped to express themselves under acute stress. Throughout the pandemic, parents around me have lamented an explosion in breakdowns and tantrums, in even their older children. If my online work meetings are any indication, parents you work with are noticing the same. The high-level explanation for this is that children depend on routine at home and in learning environments, which was demolished by lockdown and social distancing protocols. The lack of control, lack of social contact, sustained fear, and inability to justify the fairness of it all drove many children (and adults) to the brink. Psychologists say validating children’s feelings helps immensely. As we help the kids in our lives understand, articulate, and accept their feelings, we teach them how to avoid spiraling out of control. We teach them resilience. Adults need to do this for ourselves, too.
Right now, a lot of us are trying to avoid the labor. I am too, sometimes. The pandemic made loss a daily, palpable experience and it has definitely overstayed its welcome. However, the campaigns to force normalcy and circumvent the grief are harmful. The pressure to resume life as we once knew it was (and remains) so great that I worry we will opt for emotional amnesia just to speed up the process. To some extent, this would be a fair course of action. After all, the human brain is wired to manage trauma and largely save us from the misery of committing it to clear memory. However, given the intensity of what we have endured, there needs to be some sort of reckoning. We certainly didn’t choose to undergo a collective trauma, but we are responsible for who we become as we recover. We need to feel our feelings, even the inconvenient ones, in order to recover from this.
Some people I love would say that while the pandemic disrupted their lives, they largely “had it good.” They didn’t “lose much” and therefore, they feel guilty to acknowledge the little they did lose. There is definitely a cohort of people who luckily kept their jobs, had a safe place to quarantine, and managed to avoid infection. Surely, they did have it good, right? Well, yes. But what are all of our lives in the end if not a string of moments and experiences of joy? From weddings, all the way down to the belly-laughs you share with your partner or friends, it is the spark of contentment and connection to those around you that makes life an enchanting experience, even if it is otherwise mostly mundane. These are moments we all lost. So, why are we quick to invalidate ourselves? Do we think we don’t have a right to grieve? Do we think these aren’t grief-worthy losses? Yes, it certainly could have been a lot worse for many of us, but it also could have been better and it is okay, even encouraged, to admit that.
If I had to guess, I would say that we struggle because the crux of labeling and processing loss and grief is recognizing it happened to us, not someone else. The quiet truth is we actively distance ourselves from the experience of trauma. It is always distant, happening to someone else, changing the lives of anyone but us. Wouldn’t that be convenient? I’ve always thought so, especially at the onset of each loss I’ve borne throughout my life. But, the first step out of the cave has always been to accept it is happening. The immediacy of this is necessitated by another inconvenient truism: we are always running out of time. There is never enough time in this life to show the people we love the enormity of our devotion to them and there is certainly not enough time in this life to waste any of it in regret of what we did not do or did not say. In something so finite as a lifetime where the primary attraction is moments of euphoria, we cannot justify being dishonest with our hearts and prolonging grief. To make room for the joy we crave, we have to acknowledge the loss we suffered.
And yeah, it all sucks. It sucks to accept that 2020 truly was as bad of a year as it seemed, it happened to us and we have to sit with its emotional fallout a little longer before we can move past it meaningfully. Similarly, the most unbearable part of chronic depression is the intimate familiarity you cultivate with manifestations of loss in your life. But, out of this comes a valuable lesson: loss is permanent, its process is not. Each lap around this painful block has taught me that there is often no beautiful, worthy lesson to be taken away from loss. There isn’t always a reason, an obvious higher purpose or a rational chain of events to evaluate. And, you have to go on anyway. Some traumas do not get resolved, they get carried. The least we can do for ourselves is make them a little less heavy.
I can see better days on the horizon. As the vaccination rates grow and daylight stretches longer, it feels as though finally, there is an end to suffering in sight. As we reach for our better days, I hope we grieve, too. Grieve all the small loses because they add up and right now, we are all on our individual Everests. Grieve so we can walk out of the cave having acknowledged loss appropriately, so that we can get back to our lives ever so slightly lighter and with a renewed appreciation for what moments of happiness mean to us after experiencing deprivation of them. Grieve because there is a lot of life ahead and also, not enough life ahead. Let the time left run out in the name of joy.
I’m on my way out of my cave. I hope to hug you outside.
