We knew this day would come. One year ago, I was so anxious. I was a ball of tension waiting to collect my child and bring them home that Friday, knowing that schools and workplaces were closing all around us and having resisted the urge all of that week to keep us all at home ahead of the decision we knew was coming. Parents were distancing, we weren’t hugging, we were using hand sanitizer. My friends who are microbiologists were emphasizing all of this as absolutely necessary; I was closely following what had happened in Italy and stocking our pantry and freezer well ahead of our area’s shutdown.
This year, I learned the ways in which anxiety has served me and pushed back against the ways it has not. I have struggled to relax out of hypervigilance for decades; I felt a degree of relief when my nervous system’s level of alertness aligned with the events going on around me, even if only through the early part of the summer. Once my child and partner were both working and schooling from home, I was much less anxious. This was an actual full-blown crisis, and my body is calm in a crisis. It’s a state of being in which it expects to exist at all times, an expectation that causes so many problems for me when there is not a global pandemic during a rise of fascism threatening all our lives. Last year, my nervous system was like, look, see, I was right all along. There is a lot to be said for not being right sometimes.
It is not my desire to recap the entire year we all just lived through. It was awful. Many people died. Many people became and are now ill. From COVID, from isolation, from stress, from an inability to access necessary care for ongoing health conditions. It remains awful.
Somehow, we are all going to have to learn to live again. Newly. Now, in this post-2020 state. With our survivors’ guilt, with our grief, with the health impacts we don’t yet know the full extent of. I have been thinking a lot about the AIDS survivors I knew the 90s, mostly gay men who had either dodged HIV entirely or had lived long enough with HIV to arrive at the state where the drugs began to keep people alive for good. In 1997, a longtime survivor was someone who had lived with HIV for 10 years. We don’t even use that language anymore, but believe me when I say that survivors’ guilt around HIV endures among older LGBTQ people. Why me, why not me. All of us who are here now, still, will have to grapple with this, in ways we have likely been skirting the edges of throughout. Why me (with/out a job), why me (with/out an infection), why me (with/out a home), why my loved one, why a stranger.
I will say what activists and scholars have said for decades now about HIV/AIDS: there is no moral message in a virus. Who gets it, who does not. Who dies, who does not. There is no morality here, no good or bad. There are odds and chances, near misses and sudden deaths. We have survived. Others have not. It is not because of what any of us individually did or did not do, although it is true that systems and policies failed many of us in profound ways. We did our best in a situation largely beyond our control, made choices within frameworks presented to us, frameworks that are uneven and unequal. We can spend the rest of our days shrinking ourselves down to fit into a place of guilt or we can find a way to grieve and live.
Today, I dropped off a piece of art at a local art center, for consideration as part of a show of community work that will go up in a local coffee shop, a collage I made in an online class I took through them this fall. I am wearing a t-shirt commemorating an online concert by one of my favorite bands, streamed in the early month of the pandemic as a fundraiser for the food banks in their home state. I am typing this on the new computer I had to buy when it became clear that my old computer would not rise to the needs of the situation when we were all online all the time. Next to me is the new phone I eventually caved and purchased once I accepted that no one got my texts on time and I was largely unintelligible on my old phone, which had become the way I connected even with my friends on the next block. Farther into this room is my child’s work desk, with a school-issued computer; the repurposed train table now covered with LEGOs; a stack of books waiting to be read by authors I’ve supported through online book talks; my trusty paper planner that’s filled largely with notes about when I cooked what so that we don’t go through all of this only to die of food poisoning in the end.
There is nowhere to rest my eyes that doesn’t reflect some adaptation to what we faced last year. The question is: what situation do we find ourselves in now? Not just where do we go from here, but how. Just yesterday I talked to a friend on the phone and we vowed to embrace each other’s weird, awkward, un/inhibited behaviors when we see each other again. That’s what I wish for all of us, as we emerge blinking into the light of 2021. The pandemic is not over yet, but we can start to learn a new way of living, together.