I went through the first few weeks of the pandemic with an odd sensation of complete calm. One might assume that, for an immunocompromised person living in a major metropolitan area, this calm was surely the result of shock. The entire world turned upside down! Unemployment skyrocketing! Recently healthy people dying all around me! Certainly part of it might have been shock, but more centrally, the calm was a matter of inertia: in a lot of ways, my life didn’t really change so much as it stalled. And my mind had not yet registered that the ship’s engines had been cut.
Because in the immediate aftermath, there wasn’t a whole lot to adjust to. I was already marginally employed. I was already spending most, if not all, of my time at home. I was already headed full-tilt into an existential crisis wherein I was fully disillusioned by my previous life and had no plan for my future, nor did I believe myself capable of making the changes necessary to even get started down a new path. I was already reconsidering grad school. “These uncertain times” was my standard state of being.
So when the world around me went into lockdown, it was kind of … a relief? I don’t know whether I should be ashamed of the privilege inherent in that statement, or shameless because it speaks to the state of low-grade desperation I was already in. But it was like my universe had decided to dovetail its own troubles with mine, and grant me time. The structural permission to fall apart and, for a few weeks, be nothing at all. I would pay rent for April because I had that money saved. Come May, I would either have rent money, or I wouldn’t. I could not choose a new career even if I had decided on one, because nobody was making anything or hiring anyone anyway. The world told me it was okay—necessary, even—to put my very immediate problems on hold.
With my existential crisis temporarily restrained to the background, the foreground ceded itself to usefulness. My silly newsletters about television suddenly seemed like the most impossible, wasteful use of my time. All the jokes and quietly bubbling anxieties about how I would fare in an apocalypse ceased to be hypothetical: what do you know how to do right now? the world asked. Not much, I replied. So as everyone was learning how to bake bread, I got back up to speed on my own starter. As my seamstress peers got to work sewing masks, I finally pulled out my grandmother’s sewing machine and taught myself how to use it, with only its hand-drawn 1950s manual as my guide. I took up drawing again; I made and sold hand-lettered greeting cards. (I joked that my living room had become an arts and crafts camp, with designated stations in every corner.) I made condiments from scratch (don’t recommend), started saving more packaging for reuse (do recommend), even attempted to groom the dog (fml) — it seemed like every day I was figuring out a new anti-hack for my life.
Of course, I also spent a lot of time on my phone. Cycling through social media apps compulsively. Bingeing TV shows while cycling through social media apps compulsively. Staying up late for no reason. Sleeping in for no reason. Spiraling into the kind of slow depression that creeps up on you in the absence of real structure or tangible accountability to anyone except your dog. (Thank god for therapy and psychopharmacology, is what I’m saying.)
At the same time, I found myself focusing on what little structure there was to find: in accountability to other people. I started helping a friend with a grassroots operation to deliver food and supplies to local unhoused encampments through an Amazon wishlist. (This newsletter is now a marketing vehicle for this list, by the way. If you like me, you’ll buy a $30 camping stove for somebody right now.) I started volunteering with Nithya Raman’s City Council campaign. I joined a group working to establish the first free fridge in Los Angeles. Helping friends physically put food (and hella tampons) in people’s physical hands is the only sure thing I can count on right now. There is absolutely nothing abstract about it.
Because of how my brain works, I don’t think these projects and their core values will allow me to make them a full-time job; I’m bored too easily, resent too easily, link my passions to my self-worth too easily. In between researching police behavior and dropping off fire extinguishers and hustling my social media followers into buying tents and coolers, I’m dragging a precious few minutes of writing out of my brain every so often. (This newsletter is the most I’ve written since you last heard from me.) So far, it doesn’t amount to anything good. If my imagination returns at some point, maybe it will. Every day, even getting started is a slog.
At the risk of going full millennial white woman and making this about me, I can’t help but think about what’s happened since as the macro version of a simple, yet brutal lesson I’ve had to learn over the past few years: institutions are just people making choices. Most of the time, they’re bad, selfish choices. Just because you did not see how the sausage got made, does not mean that the sausage is eternal, or good. Comfortable people think about systems like this because it’s both too huge to see fully and too simple to seek an alternative. Systems are a sort of social shorthand that serves their (our) purposes; it’s the water to the fish, to use that analogy we’ve all been beaten over the head with in recent months. This is just how the world works. The system is the world; many, many people smarter than I created and improved upon it before I was born, and I expect it will continue apace after everyone I know is dead. In the meantime, my life is less unbearable when I don’t seek out its rough edges. But, of course, as I have personally learned, you can be “good at the system” and it will still spit you out, for the sole reason that it can be more profitable for the powerful without you.
A few months before the pandemic, dreading the imminent end of my steadiest work in years, I had a thought. I typed it out, stashed it in the pocket of my journal, then promptly forgot about it. The other night, I rediscovered it: “One’s willingness to take chances is inversely proportional to the amount of control one feels one has over their lives. It’s on the margins, amid uncertainty, where gambling happens, and where change is created; risk is taken out of necessity and out of a belief that nothing is promised you.” There are literally no rules anymore. Whatever peace you had before is gone now. The only thing left is to do right by the people around you. The people you will have to live with on this scorched earth. That’s all a system is, anyway.