Slow days, quiet healing: what trauma taught me about surviving a pandemic
What does it take to survive a pandemic? Waiting, mostly, and if nothing kills you, then you make it out alive. I do mean to suggest here that survival is passive, in the way that you don’t have to do anything to heal a cut, you just let time pass. And so these days, I let time happen to me. Ever since I lost my job at a fashion magazine (furloughed indefinitely) I have spent the quarantine in Berlin measuring away the days by the box of sunlight that moves across my unkept bedsheets. Sobriety grinds. I might reread the same 10 sentences of Žižek over again, unable to concentrate, and resort to lying in bed and listening to podcasts. Sometimes, I think about God. At night, I tune into friends’ live streams as they DJ in empty rooms and I try to dance in place but mostly feel stupid.
A friend texts me images from his studio where he continues feverishly painting, even as his upcoming show in London was canceled. I am moved by this romantic but helpless gesture – the artist-hero painting as morgues all around him overcrowd with bodies. I’m less capable of heroic productivity, but I’m really good at waiting. Quarantine has made me think about the nine months I’d spent in virtual isolation at my parents’ house in California in 2013, after I was sexually assaulted by a homeless man in New York. I had lost my job then – fired, because a habit (cry for help?) of doing coke in the handicapped stall made me erratic and unreliable at the office, but even if anyone wanted to ask what was going on, I wouldn’t tell them. So I canceled all the plans I had made for my life, and moved back into my childhood bedroom, where I slept beneath a concert poster from the band I played with in high school.
My parents cooked for me, but we didn’t talk much during dinners. Later that summer, my grandmother died. Honestly, I hate talking about that year, though these days my mind homes around it. Then, like now, I was unable to forecast my future because I wasn’t convinced that the underlying structures that make it possible to plan beyond one week in advance, let alone the tasks of a day, still held. In a reality where “anything can happen” and cancel your life, you stop making plans. I was too bitter of the trauma I was dealt, consigning my days to an aggressive boredom that rendered anticipation a pleasure so sharp I couldn’t tell it from dread.
My life never exactly went back to normal. In the seven years since the assault, the sexual and romantic life I thought I deserved was never returned. For years, I couldn’t have sex. I hated disclosing the assault to people, because it made them treat me with kid gloves, even though I felt perennially raw and defensive. Still, I’ve never had a boyfriend, the regret of my life. I have lived this way for so long that I forget that it could have been different. I deserved more then. We deserve more now.
Our lives are not going back to normal, as one way of being has been abruptly and unilaterally aborted, without our consent. Instead, we’re left with the grief for tens of thousands of lives lost, trillions of dollars evaporated, and a future of promise that was wiped out for an entire generation.
Some days grief entails languishing in bed, because that issurviving. Though clarity can come when doing nothing. Even in global cataclysm, I believe in integrity, in remembering who I was before trauma tried to claim me in its single-mindedness. You can only find integrity by spending this much time with yourself. Even as my free time smothers, being enveloped by my own thoughts and anxieties can be generative. Such solitude is not a state, but a practice you get better at over time. When limited to the mere resources of your own mind in the solitude that is the “radical nakedness of the soul” (Catherine Malabou), you become trained to trust your own thoughts alone to see you through the terror. Sit with the embarrassment of uncertainty. Even fear can be nourishing – it alerts the senses, ripens colors. Self-becoming is an unsentimental business, from which you emerge bruised but fortified, ready to relate to the renewing terrors of the world with a kind of leathery compassion: character.
I survived the assault, I’ll live through this, I’ll get out of bed. To break up the days, I’ll sometimes go for a walk by the canal outside my apartment wearing a Prada coat that, now without a job, I’d no longer be able to afford. But I have to stick to the decisions I’ve made. I stand by the person I was before the virus.
Geoffrey Mak is a writer in Berlin
In a reality where 'anything can happen' and cancel your life, you stop making plans