reflections on the past year
care in the time of coronavirus, oh wait, the virus is just your brain
Listen– I don’t know how to tell you all that you willingly signed up for my novella. If Substack allowed me to view this post’s edit history, trying to open it would surely crash my browser. But let’s all take a moment of gratitude for me for at least dividing Side A and Side B into separate pieces, because for a very long time, I was set on keeping them together. Yes there’s a Side B. The topics are all but mutually exclusive though. You’ll see what I mean when I publish it, most likely next week, to give you time to recover from this one. But just as a forewarning, you should probably only read this when you have a good chunk of time on your hands, like if you are procrastinating HARD or haven’t been able to sleep after three hours of trying. Otherwise, don’t even bother. My feelings will not be hurt.
I also can’t believe how nerve-wracking it is to write about myself like you don’t all subscribe to this Substack expecting to read about me going on about myself. I have to say, I loved the idea in theory at first, but then I started writing this reflection for an audience other than myself and I found out that I hated it. Then I would step away from it for a bit and forget how much I hated it and come back and be reminded and long story short: I am going to stick to writing about other things outside of myself after this. Oh yeah, and I will not try to be nearly this ambitious in length and scope for a long, long time.
ANYWAY. Without further ado:
Side A
2020 was by every definition an interesting year – outwardly, for all of the reasons that the flow of news we typically think of as a stream hemorrhaged into a thunderous curtain of rain; but inwardly as well, as we were all physically and psychologically siloed off from normalcy. Many of us were forced to be truly alone with ourselves for the first time in a very long time, and that bled into the horrifying revelation that we regularly make active efforts to keep ourselves out of that very situation.
I mean, I don’t know about you; I’m my own favorite person to be around, but quarantining in this brain with all of its inconveniently shaped baggage for eighteen months does not sound like it was in any way set up to go well!
In addition to this, at the converging point of the most mass hysteria crossed with the least cultural and scientific understanding of the disease, I relocated to the opposite coast from where I had been living, under the impression that it’d be a temporary stay somewhere that wasn’t experiencing a toilet paper shortage, no longer than three weeks.
I admit I was a little in denial about the gravity of the situation to begin with. There was simply no time, no useful context to plan even three months into the future. It felt like what we knew about reality was one fixed point, and then, without warning, someone tilted the room and reality was suddenly all the way over there on the other side of the room. It was not comforting to know how easily it could be displaced.
Leaving all of my belongings behind in a storage unit for an indeterminable period of time only further emphasized my association of materiality with the life I was used to. To me, my things signified autonomy and the hard work it required to accumulate them. When I landed in the Raleigh-Durham Airport, I had only brought some summer clothes, a few books, and three bags of whole bean coffee. I had no winter wear with me, no nightstand to service my side of the bed, not even a mug that I could claim as mine and take up that much real estate in our newly shared studio. I did not want to start over; to live on my three weeks’ worth of rations; to have to renegotiate household finances, scheduling, labor, or groceries. So even in the face of something good (ending long distance to to be with my significant other in person), the presence of change to this degree predisposed me to anger and difficulty.
By the time I moved to North Carolina in March of 2020, Misha had already been encouraging me to give therapy another chance. I denied that the sudden lockdown bore any relevance to my mental state, that I was doing better than usual, that therapy would ultimately fall short on its promise and I’d be left alone to reconcile with the fact that I was simply a lost cause, that I was overreacting to unremarkable stressors, that others needing therapy more therefore couldn’t justify my need for it, that the only way out was through. Coincidentally, here is me in a tweet, living blissfully rent-free in my own cognitive dissonance:
This is one centrifugal force from which practically every justification of mine to sidestep the therapy conversation stems:
If you have had at least one conversation with me about how I was doing or what I was thinking about at any point during 2020, I probably mentioned this book. Or at least, I thought about mentioning this book but decided I wouldn’t be overwhelming that day. If you are someone whose ear I talked off about it, I’m sure you are currently preparing yourself to make it through through the rest of this essay. Fear not! I don’t talk about the book itself here nearly as much as I do the framework it sets up – namely, reflecting on self-delusions.
Even before someone gifted me Trick Mirror at the beginning of 2020, understanding the delusions we tell ourselves to lubricate this hopelessly awful existence has always been the bread and butter of self-betterment in my book. Saying this does not mean I think I am particularly good at this. But through this, I mean to convey three things I believe:
That a well-rounded approach to self-care is inclusive of the ability to remain graceful in not knowing everything;
That even in the discouraging position of not knowing everything and never being able to know everything, there is still value in admitting when you’re wrong and in making efforts to learn and grow anyway;
That the conditions of modern life can be so depressingly inhospitable that some self-delusions are fundamentally vital in order to survive and avoid being dragged down by the muck.
It’s not because I read Trick Mirror that I was stubborn about going to therapy. It’s because I thought therapy was about learning to be comfortable sitting smack in the middle of your own personalized brand of cognitive dissonance, and I, being the little shit that I am, was convinced that I already knew how to do this, and that if you want something done right to do it yourself. Plus, I also wanted to believe that I had done enough work in the right direction to dig up this core truth and be able to claim that prestige.
I have a broader argument to back this up:
I recently watched the episode of Friends where the group all come to hate Phoebe’s new boyfriend, a shrink, for his take-no-prisoners, takedown-style psychoanalyses of each of Phoebe’s friends. This show is so deserving of its praise for its ability to carry interpersonal and existential dilemmas beyond era-specificity, but to me at least, it’s also an excellent case study in how millennials think of themselves as postured at a moral high ground between Gen Z and boomers – that they have a better developed understanding of the world than the former, and that they’re more progressive than the latter.
Regardless of whether this shrink’s input was invited or not, witnessing the vehement rejection of each person to accept these explanations or even demonstrate the vaguest interest in understanding why they think they are the way that they are by a different rationale was jarring to watch. In my eyes, the norm among most of my peers is possessing the ability and willingness to compartmentalize the offensiveness of the proposition from the plausibility of the argument.
Reflecting on self-delusion is what separates the Gen Zers from the millennials and the millennials from the baby boomers, each generation growing more and more self-aware. It shows us how the collective generation of individuals between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five have improved upon the existing formula of equal parts cynicism, dissociation, self-immersion, and emotional asymmetricality with grounded idealism, self-reflexivity, de-centering of personal ego, and ease with internal conflict in its most extreme iteration yet.
Combing through your subconscious, triangulating around seemingly randomly surfaced traumas and triggers, contouring the relentlessness of living around your own perceived shortcomings, and devastating your ego into obliteration, all while trying to pick up the litter that defiles the minds of your equally plagued friends – no one I knew online or offline growing up was afforded this skill set by a licensed therapist. Few of us received the validation from our adult caretakers to seek out professional help, fewer still the financial commitment. Much of this education surrounding mental health we acquired informally through community-based knowledge-sharing, which the Internet has stepped in to both cultivate and exacerbate, for better and for worse. Maybe that’s why traditional therapy is going to increasingly fall short as modernity continues to evolve, introducing novel social anxieties even younger and younger.
I did eventually find a therapist who I liked very much. But as it turns out, I was fairly accurate in predicting the futility of my relationship with one, at least at this stage in my life, which I won’t deny is partly a self-fulfilling prophecy. After a few months, it became apparent to the both of us that I preferred playing both parts on my own, immediately chasing my own turbulent spirals with my best approximation of a third person’s detached perspective (or what is at the very least contrarian for sport) in our sessions before she could muscle a single word in. While I do still believe that therapy can be an immensely productive resource for many, I think that I’ve personally passed the window where I could have benefitted from it the most. My therapist and I had a friendly breakup, and I do occasionally think about asking her out to lunch when social distancing restrictions have been lifted.
There is one ripple my therapist did leave behind, a funny sort of parting gift, which I accepted because I thought it could’ve been true at one point: “You don’t seem to tolerate other people, do you?”
I love the friends I grew up with, but I didn’t realize that their empathy and effort to situate my mental health should not be things I have to beg for until I spent some time alone in the years around the cusp of my twenties. During this self-imposed monasticism, I honed in on the kind of person I most wanted to be if I had to be around her and the values I wanted to share with other people I could consider friends. I’m making it sound more dramatic and on Chris McCandless levels than it actually was. In reality, it was just nice to give myself the room to collapse and recombine and simply coexist with the cloudy debris of my mind, freed from much of the yoke of responsibility to and from others.
I think I’ve reclined too deeply into my own aloneness, because in the past couple of years, I’ve been finding myself pushing back even more so than usual on feeling cornered. I’m one of those people who requires an almost unreasonable berth from human contact otherwise I feel intensely claustrophobic. Truly manspreading in my solitude. I can also be pretty prickly when certain thoughts or actions expected from me, which only feels like I am being set up to disappoint and then also have to be the one who lives with that. I sometimes have low-functioning weeks that recede into less social months, and when friends consider the side effects of these dry seasons to be personally affronting, it only makes me want to disengage even further.
But there are also constants and redeeming qualities to my friendship. When someone I love is undergoing a difficult ordeal, space and the goodwill to dissolve into messiness is something I know how to give them. I try not to judge and to exercise forgiveness when the breadcrumb trail goes cold, but also not to let it stay cold for too long. These next two have trickled down from people I love showing me how to respect their emotional needs, even though I couldn’t fully grasp what they were feeling at the time: I won’t act like I know better than you, and I won’t push more than once. Everyone deserves the grace of choosing their own timing and making their own decisions. That comes first, even if someone else’s experiences can shield them from making what ultimately becomes a mistake.
There is a point to all this. We are who we are largely in the context of others. As much as I resisted this when I was younger, as much as I still resist this, who I am to to my friends and the other people who have to deal with me can never be fully separated from the version of myself I’ve constructed – what is in my mind the purest, canonical version. And when these versions contradict each other, or maybe because there’s one I have less control over, intuitively I want to chuck one of them out the window, and we all know which one.
And so it’s not quite that I don’t tolerate other people. At the same time, I recognize how off-putting it may be to those whose ideologies around friendship veer sharply in another direction. My withdrawal from being more consistently present and from readily opening up can read as self-superiority, active dislike, indifference, or intentional detachment. In reality, it is formed foremost in the interest of self-preservation, of wanting to establish clear lines where there are dissolving margins, of rejecting the premise that we are all just natural extensions of each other, of having gotten so good at not needing others that I almost view it as unfair for myself to be needed. Perhaps the urgency with which I feel this is compounded by the emotional taxation of the pandemic, but largely this feeling has been supporting itself for years.
There are so many individuals who I admire and enjoy being around, who enrich my life in their own indescribably special ways, who I’d fall apart without in some some alternate timeline where that happens. But I want the tollbooths to close sometimes and not everyone can relate to that. I’m an untimely, unresponsive, sometimes maddening person to try to get ahold of via text – always have been, and probably always will be – and some people think this makes me a bad friend by default, like there are not other ways to communicate within and show up for a friendship, and I do. This is how you love me: you respect my need to be alone and honor what matters to me, even if you can’t relate to it.
My brain has felt floppy from nearly two decades of abuse and overwear. I am who I am who I am. I have poured many crucial moments spanning years into coaxing forth a sense of self that I am proud of, one that is finally uncompromised and specific enough and yet still so fragile and sacred; a tiny, furious beating in the palm of my hand. Day by day, I am less and less interested in how I look through the tint of another’s life. And with this time, the cloudy debris of my mind has since drifted over the threshold of I hate it here into somewhere I didn’t mind as much being, where things have grown and could maybe even one day flourish.
When I was younger, the Internet raised me on a social imperative to be known, to look for myself in others, to collapse distance and dissolve myself wholly and gladly into kinship. Now, the time for earnestness appears to be over. I want nothing more than to retire back into the cool, occlusive cave of my own mind and sleep for a thousand years.
So if there can be any positive aspects to be culled from the tragedy of the coronavirus pandemic, the first that springs to mind is license to retreat inward, endlessly.
But doing so also deepens the distance to traverse when you are called back into the real world. And you have to go when it calls, because not everyone is as intensely familiar with the layout of their own headspace when they are about to sink into apathy or irritability or desolation. They don’t know how to recognize its onset, how to warn others, how to expand space for it, how to shrink it. And in that, I am extraordinarily privileged to be so secure in my isolation that it is stony-hearted to leave my loved ones out in the cold.
A year later, I sometimes still chafe at this disruption to my single-income independence. But I think in convincing myself of how happy I was pre-pandemic, I neglect to account for how much Misha and I actually fought at that time, how a daily two-hour commute on public transportation robbed me of the energy to make dinner for myself most nights, how menacingly rent and student loan payments hovered over me while I was trying to make the end of one paycheck meet the beginning of the next (never mind even the seedling of savings), how constantly burnt out I was trying to prove for ten months that I deserved job security while I essentially worked as a contractor.
The one-year anniversary of my moving to Raleigh is this week. And while I wish the bottom of my laptop was not crusted over with crumbs from using the kitchen counter as my desk, and that I didn’t have to take some meetings from the bathroom for wont of space, I have come to make peace with taking up permanent residence within liminality and feel so much gratitude and wonder for this little brick-and-mortar town that represents the fertile soil in which something promising and new is sown.
For one, I think I’m getting better at needing people. It’s something that I’m actively working on. As much as I want another person’s blood oath to carry the precious pieces of my self over burning coals with the same solemnity as I do, I’m trying to trust others with these pieces anyway and to be more merciful when they drop them, which sometimes just happens.
I’m also trying to get better at relinquishing the bitternesses that I’ve held onto so tightly for so long that they morphed into something resembling warmth and safety. I have a more well-tuned sense of when I’m overstaying my welcome in that regard. I’m practicing compartmentalizing so I don’t totally shut down so easily. I’m learning to embrace spontaneity, to lean less on pre-planning.
Maybe all of this is what being genuinely happy is? I don’t have full resolutions on everything, but I have regained actual interests and some direction, which for the longest time since childhood I was afraid I would never come into possession of again. All of my loved ones remain healthy and safe, and the pandemic has bestowed me with the rare privilege of security, both financially and in my relationship.
A lot of this – so much of this – is owed to the Herculean efforts of the single individual who has tolerated me digging my heels in about this change for the longest time while handling a major life adjustment that affected him equally with the utmost grace – my partner, Misha. Because of him, my overall adjustment to the pandemic erred more toward inconvenience rather than the omen of bleakness / exhaustion / abandonment in the belief of joy it could’ve been had it been left in my charge alone.
I’ve always wanted to write an Acknowledgements, like they have at the end of every laborious piece of written work. In my case, this Acknowledgements is not just for the piece of writing that this is, but for the whole of the last year, and also the nearly six years before that. For Misha – my best friend, the father of our cat daughter, the love of my life. You sacrifice so much for me.
Bonus section!!
So what has care in the time of coronavirus looked like for me?
Finding light in frivolity. Leaning into the awkwardness of conference calls with everyone’s video feeds off, taking comfort in the prewritten script of small talk, regularly disengaging from the invasion of work in your home. Inflating and deflating cyclically as it was meant to be. Discarding the rest.
Trying new things, big and small, like backpacking thirteen miles in an icy gorge and twenty-three flavors of La Croix.
Pushing and pulling. Cooking ambitiously and ordering in graciously.
Becoming a regular at a beloved neighborhood eatery. Ordering vegan cheese and pesto tofu on the same pizza and someone from the shop always calling to make sure you know their pesto tofu has dairy in it. (Any lactose intolerant person will tell you regardless that imbibing in cheese is an act of self-care in itself.) Relishing picking your order up in person as a chance to leave the house and stretch your legs outside.
Reading for pleasure. Not for school or in the stolen moments as a child between being driven from one responsibility to another. Luxuriating over coffee in the morning, or on the couch where you’ve been all day, or on a blanket in the park, enjoying some nice weather. To temporarily unplug from the stone soup of communal anxiety. To consume slowly, thoughtfully.
A broader understanding of the indisputability of personal boundaries. Humanizing the need to fall off the face of the earth, for a little while.
In Tolentino’s own words:
“When I feel confused about something, I write about it until I turn into the person who shows up on paper: a person who is plausibly trustworthy, intuitive, and clear.”
Wishing you all trustworthiness, intuition, and clarity in 2021.
This was absolutely a beautiful read! Well done and very insightful :)