Bad Anniversaries and The Pandemic
Is it Daylight Savings Time (DST) or is it trauma?
Maybe both.
I wonder how many people feel mysteriously bad right now and it's related to the fact that as a society we have not dealt with the toll of the pandemic...
I’ve been seeing a lot of content debating where we are at with regards to The Pandemic.
Recent polls suggest about 59% of Americans say the pandemic is “over”. That’s lower than I’d expect… given most people seem to walk around like “The New Normal” is very close to the “before times”.
The American mindset when it comes to work and productivity means that many of us did not provide space to grieve. Even during lockdown, instead of focusing on allowing ourselves to experience our big feelings and emotions, many of us quickly found ways to be “productive” (learn how to ____). At the time, I’d argue this was less about idle hands or needing to do something with your hands, to get the tension and frustration out the body, in a difficult moment (such as now, with Trump back in office)— this was more about American work ethic and American identity. It was, in far many instances, the death of us.
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Some of us feel uncomfortable about our nostalgia for lockdown.
I’ll admit, like others, there was something about that period of lockdown that allowed for deep reflection and reorienting. It seemed like we might have a chance to change ourselves and society moving forward.
Maybe this is why companies don’t want Americans to have too much vacation time?
Not joking.
Once we get to thinking… we realize there is a lot broken about our society and that would might prefer to move through the world a bit differently.
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I have the pandemic “Anniversary” set as 3/14 aligned with the national declaration… Recently, I’ve seen others list the beginning of the pandemic as 3/11. The reality is it began for you when the situation started to hit home with you.
Also, it really did begin in China earlier.
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I’ve written about part of my pandemic experience.
You may have already read about it here.
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I keep thinking to equate this with generational trauma. I think I’m thinking of the way people simply push past events and don’t realize what is happening to them—what happens in the body and mind.
In the U.S., there was a strong push to get back to work. People such as Elon Musk were particularly frustrated. In Elon’s case, this is theorized as part of what radicalized him.
We’re still working on figuring out how work, well, works five years later.
Anyone with long covid symptoms (or related) will tell you that the pandemic certainly continues for them. “Data published by the CDC shows that nearly one in five adults in the United States (17.9 percent) have ever experienced long Covid.” Depending on your source, somewhere between 5-7% of Americans are currently dealing with long covid symptoms.
Early on, I made a prediction that (in some cases) this was at least partly due to trauma.
I had personally convinced myself that if I came down with covid, in all likelihood, I would not survive. This was during the time before vaccines and during the Delta wave. There were a lot of horror stories from those who came down with the Delta variant.
As Gallup notes, a large percentage of Americans fear another pandemic. I don’t think it’s providing much confidence that we have RFK Jr. at the helm of the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS).
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For starters, I’d like to see a memorial holiday dedicated to the millions of lives lost during the pandemic. A reminder that we do not want another plague.
I’d also like to see Dr. Fauci receive The Presidential Medal of Freedom. Trump gave it to… Rush Limbaugh. The guy went through a lot (understatement) to protect as many people as he possibly could while putting himself and his family in danger.
Most of all, we just need to have an open and honest discussion about what really happened. To get here, it would be helpful to break down at least some of the partisan divide. That being said, those who believe the facts and realities can get the process in motion.
I don’t believe in the traditional grief steps. I do believe that grief needs to be managed or it will consume you.
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Where do you stand so far as the pandemic is concerned?
Where do you think we are on the path to recovery?
What do you think we should do to commemorate this horrific time and figure out healthy ways to begin the process of truly moving forward? (Can we even do this under a Trump regime?)
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I have so many thoughts about this, I will have to sort them before I reply.
Thank you for writing this and further opening the conversation. Many scholars are, of course, addressing the questions you've put forth and there have been (and still are) efforts at memorialization of those we have lost to the pandemic. In 2020, I created a pandemic loss project that is centered in language and specificity. It was a site for Kentuckians but after it was featured on NPR, we went national. Because of this work, I became a visiting scholar at GWU, with their "Rituals in the Making" pandemic remembrance project. We work on all the questions you've posed and many more. I invite you to look at whowelost.org and ritualsinthemaking.com to see what we've done. I invite you not to be smug and point out that your questions aren't new but rather to welcome you into this realm, which (I have found) other writers and some academics look down on. I have ended friendships in the past five years when fellow poets have turned up their nose at The WhoWeLost Project and deemed it "not literary." Personally, I cannot think of anything more "literary" because you are correct -- we must address what has happened.