Brutal out here
Flourish Vol. 50
I know we’re all supposed to be vamping for a “shot girl summer” (or whatever,) but to be honest, I don’t think I’m quite there yet.
If we’re supposed to be out of the woods by now, I’m still wandering in some foggy, Mare of Easttown-esque bramble, canopied by lingering sadness and gloom.
Talking with my therapist this week, I felt at least a little validated in still not feeling “better.” She told me that, across the board, she and her colleagues have found patients struggling now, perhaps more so than at any other point during all this, as the pandemic draws to an end.
If 15 months of lockdown eventually congealed into a strangely comforting, fugue state-cocoon (at least for those of us who were not frontline workers,) I think so many of us are poised to emerge not as butterflies ready to spread our wings, but as shrieking cicadas; flustered and frazzled, probably a little socially awkward, sexually frustrated, and a touch unhinged.
I was fortunate enough to finally return to Los Angeles last week, reuniting with friends I hadn’t seen since last summer for activities that felt by all accounts like a return to “normal”: wine tastings, girls’ nights, escape rooms, eating indoors(!) I was grateful and hopeful and wistful and a little dazed. And yet still I felt like I was holding my breath — waiting to exhale, waiting for things to feel right again. But so many of us just aren’t there yet.
“If you’ve been swimming furiously for a year, you don’t expect to finally reach dry land and feel like you’re drowning,” Ed Yong writes for the Atlantic, in “What Happens When Americans Can Finally Exhale.”
Drowning, water in the lungs, limbs spinning like propellers and getting nowhere fast, feels apt. I am fatigued, I am ready to move on, but I am shell-shocked and leaden and feel like I have more questions than answers most days. I have always considered myself to be resilient, but the brutality of the pandemic has left me questioning my strength. Even as the worst seems to be behind us here in the US, people are “struggling with the struggle,” as one expert wrote.
“People don’t recognize themselves,” trauma expert Laura van Dernoot Lipsky told the Atlantic. “They say, ‘I used to be the person who dealt with really hard things.’”
I feel very far from myself these days. In the past year and a half, my body, my home, my job, many of my friendships and relationships, have all drastically changed. I wish I could give myself more grace, and yet I find myself so often wondering why I haven’t “bounced back,” why depression and fatigue have rendered me utterly useless at times, why this has all affected me so much.
But it isn’t exactly a mystery as to why a year of gritting our teeth in a world turned upside down, on the defense against a deadly disease and despair around every corner, has left so many of us unable to let our guards down, to resume where we once left off: “I think some people believe we pressed ‘pause,’ and we’ll go back to the way things were before,” said psychiatrist Jessi Gold. “As if we didn’t have all the intervening experiences, as if 2020 didn’t happen, as if getting a vaccine erases your memory.”
It’s no wonder employees are already resisting companies’ plans to slot them back into their old cubicles and commutes, as if none of this ever happened. It’s no wonder so many of us have found ourselves questioning our values, our time, our purpose.
We all need a little grace in learning how to live our lives again in a world that has fundamentally changed. And for many, the way forward will be a radical departure from the pre-pandemic past. An acceptance that the old world has died, and that in some ways, for some people, that may be for the best.
“If your relationships, work, and life have been disrupted by the pandemic, the weeks and months before you fully reenter the world should not be wasted. They are a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to come clean with yourself—to admit that all was not perfectly well before.”
On a lighter note, the joyous post-vaccine reunions I was able to witness (and experience!) while traveling are giving me life (and I’ll never, ever take being in the same room with my friends for granted again.)
Reads and recommendations:
On how the pandemic — during which we were all a captive audience to our devices and overly-invested in other people’s lives — has changed our relationship with social media: “Even a lighthearted life update can feel like a form of competition: Who has the best job? The biggest house? The most beautiful family?”
Speaking of, I’ve found one of the clearest and most resonant voices online lately to be none other than 19-year-old Emma Chamberlain (I’m as surprised as you are, believe me!) Despite having millions of followers and more money than I’ll make in a lifetime, she seems to have a refreshingly firm grasp on reality and keen understanding of the fleeting nature of fame and illusion of social media. Her slice-of-life vlogs have brought me so much joy during quarantine, and her podcast — particularly this episode on social media that inspired me to finally delete a few toxic apps from my phone — feels like a mix between a therapy session and a heart-to-heart with a really cool friend wise beyond her years.
Kacey Musgraves’ Elle profile — both the. photos and words — is gorgeous from start to finish. And the announcement (finally!) of a new album later this summer is definitely giving me hope for brighter days ahead. Both 2015’s Pageant Material and 2018’s Golden Hour are sonic time capsules from very specific chapters of my life, and like Kacey, I’m more than ready for the next one.
“I am so repelled by the artificial, the chatter, the pressures of society. It doesn’t matter. We’re not here for very long.” - Kacey Musgraves
I certainly didn’t expect to be trading in (most) of my sad indie girl tunes in favor of pop anthems during the pandemic, or to feel as seen by teenage heartbreak ballads at 27 as I do by 18-year-old Olivia Rodrigo’s Sour, but I’m fully on board (there were more than a few liberating moments scored by “Good 4 U” during my trip to LA.) “Deja Vu,” “Jealousy” and “Happier” all hit me right where I live, but I’m finding Brutal to be especially cathartic. It is, as my colleague Scaachi Koul writes, the perfect song for our (post?) pandemic summer:
“It’s a fun song, but the real appeal is that it hits at the right time. A lot of us are starting to crawl out of our hovels, shaggy, disoriented, having not seen the sun in so many months, to reintegrate into a society that we’re not all necessarily happy to take part in again. The social anxiety for many of us — even as we enjoy our newfound immunity — is sky-high; after spending more than a year avoiding each other because of the risk of possibly dying, or maybe worse, killing each other, we’re expected to return to prepandemic day-to-day interactions in a snap, as if there’s even a “normal” to return to.”
“It is brutal out there. Everywhere. It’s brutal at work, it’s brutal at home, it’s brutal on the internet, it’s brutal to have survived all your worst days, even if you’re grateful, even if you did indeed survive. It’s nice to hear someone just come out and say it, and in the kind of pop song that you can, indeed, dance to.”
In more true-to-form (for me) music news, my Bendigo boys are back, and thank god, because this song is exactly the escapist soundscape my soul wants to wander around in for a while.
It’s all sugar in the creek, my lover / we dissolve at the confluence
Anyway. Life is strange and hard right now, in a different way than it’s been strange and hard for the past 15 months, and was strange and hard long before that, too. Let’s remember to give ourselves grace, and rest, and the space to put ourselves back together — or to start again with something wondrous and new.
Olivia