Memories are not a "normal" we can return to

Covid Jan 24, 2025

When the pandemic began, we were all stripped of context and presence and certainty. Even those who denied covid, railed against so-called "lockdowns", and refused to mask, still lost something.

As offices and schools and restaurants closed, we lost physical contexts that are helpful for our bodyminds to focus and meet our complex homeostatic needs. Our homes became our whole generic context, the same way digital devices do. We lost the social context and presence for us to co-regulate. Without specific physical and social contexts to map our needs and actions against, our bodyminds pay an energetic tax. The few who were wading in the shallows of a digital life were thrown into the deep end. We all faced more uncertainty and shifting information than ever before. Even the first generations of digital natives struggled to cope. Everything starts to melt together and time warps.

Unprecedented.

We could not fully feel each other's presence over Zoom. Yet faced with few alternatives and high switching costs and variation in tech literacy, we invested our time there anyways. Investment dollars followed our time, chasing elusive user traction. We became acquainted and then prepared for Zoom bombing. We argued publicly over social media with deniers or vice versa and privately rationalized our own choices. Some of us became political pawns to be argued about.

We still adjusted, the way embodied beings do. The way we have to. The way we evolved to. Work and appointments moved remote. People formed pods. We traded information and overwhelm. We made diagrams and we planned. Some relished and others languished and most of us taste tested both. Along with our sourdough starters, of course.

We collectively wondered "When will this end?".

Memes circulated about a 2020 summer where we laughed about spring lockdowns. What is more human than some misguided and misplaced optimism? Sometimes we even call that hope.

The early days were more of an adjustment for people who have lived stable lives or who have lives depending upon them. Some had never spent much time alone before. Pandemics are another shock from climate crisis, like the south getting snow or wildfire smoke hitting your air and lungs for the first time. Others were new to experiencing fear about their or a loved one's physical and mental health. The reliance and pressure on nuclear families and women increased. Parents worked while watching children learn remotely. Women sandwiched between generations juggled care of children and elders, both high risk groups. Relationships ruptured and many were not repaired.

We were not prepared. It was a loss of our control over our lives. Who would have put a pandemic on their 5 year plan?

For those of us who are used to having little control, the pandemic brought more freedom, even as it brought complications. Some had paid time off from working for the first time in adulthood. They could explore hobbies and experience the boredom that fosters creativity. Others had access to remote events and work that they were previously shut out of. Some cheered, others groaned. Maybe we all got a little hoarse. And then sought out PCR or rapid tests to reassure ourselves, and each other, that it wasn't something more.

We learned to act and speak in 6 foot increments and cloth masks, because we were told that was our new reality. We stuffed our societal and cultural fractures with facts, repeating phrases that showed we were in compliance. We were one of the good ones. And so what if we fudged a little bit, forgetting an exposure event or signing up for a vaccine before our spot in line? And so what if we lost our temper and called the other side brainwashed idiots and bigots online? We were only human and these were unprecedented times.

We were in it together. Yet we were all having different experiences. We made up language and beliefs to cope with the gaps between us. Some workers became essential, working in person despite the risk to their bodymind. Healthcare workers became heroes, sacrificing time with their families while doling out limited resources and facing PPE shortages. Some relied on public transport or lived in small apartments and others had multigenerational household risk to contend with. Some dealt with all of this while being undocumented. People living in racialized bodyminds or in the global south were at increased risk in every direction.

Statements were made to reassure some at the expense of others. Only disabled and elderly would die. We became the vulnerable so others could act invulnerable.

All of our existing marginalizations and privileges were amplified and compressed and sometimes completely thrown out the window. Some of us had bars on our windows and some of us did not.

In the US, it was one of the greatest expansions of the social safety net that we've ever known. Most citizens received stimulus checks that directly hit our bank accounts, no questions asked. Others fought for that money or it threatened their existing meager benefits. Many of us fought the benefits system, built on aging legacy tech with complex bureacratic rules. Conditioned by the vague contexts of our homes and devices, we struggled to contort ourselves to hyperspecific policy and qualifying circumstances. Everyone related to being on hold. We started or intensified resentments against each other, the system, or both. Companies were given massive PPP loans to keep people employed. Protests were met with police while we argued whether violence was more important when it was against a body or property. On a legacy and land where whiteness demands and enforces their equivalence with state violence. The pandemic continues to be one of the largest transfers of wealth in our history.

When one door opens, another closes. And there's an opportunity to change the locks on doors and gates and the bars on windows. Precarity becomes possibility.

Many rules changed. Deadlines were pushed and then pushed again. As rents became eviction moratoriums and student loans grew no interest, what once seemed unbudging and unforgiving became pliable. In the early days of the pandemic even the most privileged amongst us struggled, like the celebrities now losing homes to the LA fires.

We say "eat the rich" and "free Palestine" on digital platforms and products designed with nudges and sludge. We were nudged towards creating more free content that sites could use for hostile engagement and of course, purchases and propaganda. We bought toilet paper and galaxy lights. Some dreamed of an influencer life, free from the demands and limitations of market rate labor. Others derided them for not having a real job. We all gambled on the algorithm to take us places and bring us things and show us new faces. We discussed how to actually, truly feel our feelings in a disembodied digital state designed to exploit them. We sunk in the sludge of bureaucracy, forms and friction deterring even the most determined. Our willpower and focus waned. And yet many of us still found the space and energy for each moral outrage designed to hook us. Our fact-packed-fractures widened while even our questions and thoughts about it became takes and discourse. The fractures shrunk the ground beneath us while we each inhabited a shifting spectrum of awareness and linguistics.

Individual risk calculations and acts of invulnerability became beliefs. Covid deniers were stupid, uneducated, selfish Trumpsters. Maskers were sheep that had given in to a hoax. The pandemic was shifted onto the unvaccinated, many of whom were medically vulnerable.

People traded masking for vaccines, as if not masking was a reward to be earned or won. Public health policy shifted so wearing a mask implied you were unvaxxed. People traded health privacy for vaccinated access to public spaces. We surveilled each other in public in an attempt to go viral, while facial surveillance identifies our maskless faces and our police state passes mask bans. White people stopped masking when we believed we wouldn't be as impacted. A new binary of disposability was established. Infections and propaganda continued to breakthrough our defenses. Many Americans with means went back to a high consumption lifestyle and travel that extract several times more resources than our planet can sustain. On airlines that pushed the CDC to shorten quarantine periods, some passengers cheered as masks came off midflight. Others continued to mask and were subjected to judgment, jeers, and the projection of other people's fears.

Precautions became more polarizing. Until the entire burden of mitigating the pandemic, a mass disabling era, shifted onto a few. We have held the line. We have sacrificed relationships and resources for reality. We have done this with our existing marginalizations and privileges. Disabled, medically vulnerable, and immunocompromised people continue to organize and educate others while mourning our devastating losses. Our presence in the world, our access to public spaces and care, our dear comrades and crips. We are the canaries in the coal mine and yet in every emergency and crisis, even the ones that haven't left your imagination, you leave us behind. Making fun of our access needs, accusing us of being feds and ops, all while calling us chronically online. Without radical care, your platitudes about forming community are empty. Until you can recognize that craving "normal" makes you susceptible to fascism and sacrificing others, your resistance will be empty.

You will have to face your grief and guilt before your unprocessed emotions and unconscious actions capsize all of us.

Complex dynamic systems don't have a "normal". They are full of feedback loops, oscillations, and pendulum swings that never settle. What expands can eventually, and sometimes inevitably, contract. Societal progress and stability has exhibited these patterns. Peter Turchin predicted the instability of the 2020s and so did Pluto in Aquarius.

We are in that contraction now. We have all lost something or someone. Our character and our care for one another has and will continue to be tested. None of us will receive an individual grade, because we will pass and fail this group project together.

It's never too late to start masking again.


Description of header image:

Cartoon. Masked people with 2 maskless people walking past.

One maskless person says:

"Are they afraid to die?"

Other answers:

"No, they want everyone to live."

Tags

Cakelin Fable

Polygon gargoyle. Spicy scientist, engineer, artist, and entrepreneur. Disabled, nonbinary, and bisexual. Host of Defective Detective podcast. Buddhist into books. Service dog pup Pepper Ann.

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