Pretending

I went to the movies last night. There were only two other people in the theater besides my friends and myself. Maybe six people who I saw in the theater altogether. It was nice, honestly.

I still wear a mask at work. I’m the only one who does now. I’ve been vaccinated, but it’s nice for people not to see my face. COVID-times have truly been a condition for me to thrive. For the first time since I was a kid, I had time to properly focus on myself. I was finally able to take care of myself.

I’m not eager to go back to the way life was before.

It’s not like I want the pandemic to go on forever. I never wished for it to stay. So many people have suffered directly from the pandemic. I don’t wish that on anyone.

But I won’t pretend that life before COVID was healthy for me.

A while ago I saw a Twitter thread that was for reassuring people suffering through mental illness that they don’t have to be the most productive because the world has collectively experienced a trauma. A thread centered on taking care of your mental health is something that I’ve been able to appreciate since I was 13, when I started journaling, trying to work out why I was so damn anxious all the time.

Then, as the thread continued, I got angry. Because of the sentence, “There are people who are suffering now who weren’t before the pandemic.”

My knee jerk reaction was to assume the person who created this thread only cared about mental illness now because they were experiencing it. Objectively, I don’t think this person was actually trying to say that. But it made me think about one of the most obvious truths: We view a situation entirely differently when we’re the ones suffering through it.

Photo by Johannes Plenio on Unsplash

Back in 2017, I was living in St. Thomas in the US Virgin Islands, and I was on island when Hurricane Irma hit. Due to fortunate circumstances, I was perfectly safe. I knew people who had to walk out in the middle of the storm to a neighbor’s apartment because their apartments had been destroyed. I would never want to pretend that my experience was comparable to theirs.

But I still got PTSD from it. Even today, I’ll still feel myself tense up and panic, or otherwise completely disassociate my mind from my body, when there’s a thunderstorm or really strong winds. I used to have extremely graphic, violent nightmares — though honestly most weren’t storm-related, they just mostly occurred after Irma. I’d already been struggling with depression for years, and I’ve had anxiety ever since I can remember crawling.

I’ve always struggled with my mental health in some way, but it was significantly worse from the ages of 14 through 19.

What changed when I was 20? The biggest change was a pandemic.

Not specifically a pandemic, though. Obviously a virus isn’t what improved my mental health. It was the time I was finally allowed to give to myself. It was time slowing down.

Let’s be honest, when we “go back to normal,” when the world has settled down from the aftermath of COVID-19 — which honestly probably won’t be until another year or two to mentally adjust — we very easily can fall back into the breakneck pace we were going at. At the rate we’re going now for everything to “return to normal,” we’ll be at that pace sooner than we know it. And many people will be happy to return to their lives before a pandemic.

But many people will be struggling the ways they were before a pandemic, and in many cases, even worse off than they were before. And from my experience with trauma, I’m left to wonder if anyone really will give a shit about it?

If you were to ask someone who wasn’t struggling before, of course they do. In reality, not really. Not just because of their inaction, or their unwillingness to find alternatives. But because they don’t understand. How could they actually understand? They’re not in your shoes. They probably don’t even know the half of your situation.

But they sure pretend they know what the fuck you’re talking about.

We pretended that our old lives were sustainable, when they clearly weren’t. We’re pretending that it will somehow be sustainable going forward because we want it to be. We pretend that change is hard, even after lives changed instantly in a pandemic.

My life changed after going through Irma. I changed, and I couldn’t understand why.

Photo by Torsten Dederichs on Unsplash

I’ve always struggled with change, even after going through so many in my life. By far the easiest change in my life was the immediate quarantine and adjusting to COVID-times. I don’t say that to sound better than anyone, or to dismiss anyone who’s struggled. I’m not going to pretend that I experienced lockdown the same way everyone else did. I’m just being honest with my experience.

And I know there are other people who feel the same way I feel. There are other people like me who were able to heal by going at this slower pace. There are people who have come to better understand themselves.

If you feel like you will heal better with the pace life was going at before COVID, I hope for your sake you can find and work at that pace. I’m not by any means wishing for the virus to continue wreaking havoc. All I’m asking is for life to never go back to the “normal” that I experienced.

I was miserable before COVID and, contrary to popular belief, I’d been trying to heal for years. The thing is, there is such a thing as “not enough time.” That’s another thing we like to pretend isn’t true. We like to pretend we have as much time as we need. Most of us don’t. Every helpful habit I’ve been able to build over quarantine — exercising, meditating, reading, writing, hanging out with people — I was never able to do in “normal life.” Not consistently. And even now, I still struggle with balance daily. There just isn’t enough time to do everything we want in one day. We don’t usually have energy to do everything we want either. We have to take breaks, we have to get enough sleep, we have to eat, we have to work.

And maybe to a certain extent, that’s just something in life we need to accept. But for people like me, all the work we’ve done to heal ourselves can be easily undone as everyone goes back to their business, and we’re expected to do the same. I’m not saying that it’s on anyone else if my life goes back to a pace I could never keep up with. But as we’re remembering all the things we miss that we took for granted, we also shouldn’t sugarcoat a life that isn’t suitable for many people. When life goes back to the normal, the people who weren’t struggling before will be looking forward to healing, being in their element, living the lives they’re wanting to live. And I’ll be happy for those people.

But what about the rest of us?