"Trauma is not a flaw or a weakness. It is a highly effective tool of safety and survival. Trauma is also not an event. Trauma is the body's protective response to an event - or a series of events - that it perceives as potentially dangerous."
- Resmaa Menakem
I've been watching a lot of movies lately. Partly because I have the time after work to do so, partly because I wanted to see as many of the Oscar nominated movies as I could, partly because it's a pretty good escape mechanism to not deal with the craziness that is happening in our country right now. There's a new movie on one of my favorite unknown to most streaming services (Mubi) called Grand Theft Hamlet. It's a documentary of two British actors who were struggling during the Covid lockdown and decided to attempt to put on the Shakespeare play Hamlet inside the world of Grand Theft Auto online. It's amusing - as you can probably surmise, a lot of people in that world just want to cause mayhem and violence, which means a lot of these two guys asking people if they want to be part of the play only to get killed in the game. There are also some pretty powerful moments. It's an interesting movie and it's a reminder of how insane the lockdown year during Covid actually was.
As the year that Covid took over our lives gets further and further away, I think most of us think that we have left that virus behind us. I follow a very good account on threads and instagram that provides up to date information on pandemics and epidemics that are still happening and are possible. (email me at young [dot] adam7 [at] gmail [dot] com if you would like to follow this account as well) The other day, this account informed me that Covid19 has not only not disappeared; it's at one of its peaks. More than 3 million new cases of Covid-19 has happened this week and transmission rates are now higher than at any point during 43.3% of the pandemic.
A year ago I remember talking to someone about that year of Covid and I said something to the effect of "you know, someday we are each individually going to have to deal with what happened that year. Some of us are in deep denial; some of us have turned to pretending that the threat was never real; and a lot of us never really dealt with what took place. The body doesn't forget. At some point we will have to deal with it."
I've spent the last couple of weeks during my free time - especially as I have finally gotten my hot tub up and working again! - trying to process what happened four years ago. There are a couple of reasons for this. First, as I said above, we all need to deal with what took place. For some, it was really no big deal; for others, major changes happened in their lives - deaths of people close to them, health scares, dealing with the effects of long Covid. This is a process for me that is continuing to happen, but part of my attempt to dig deep and come to terms with that year is writing this blog post.
Personally, for me, as I think about it, there are a couple of things that really affected me about Covid. Before I go into them, let me say that according to medical professionals, I never actually got the virus. Now at the very beginning, before the lockdown and before it started really spreading, I contracted some kind of illness. It was hard to breathe, I felt like there was an elephant on my chest at all times, I couldn't sleep. However, I went and got a Covid test at a health clinic, paid my hundred bucks, and was informed that I tested negative. Part of me thinks that I did have it, that the test was wrong; but the other part of me thinks I may have just had some weird illness that wasn't Covid.
Here are two things I'm processing right now.
First, I am a mail carrier (I joke and say I'm a mail escort but no one thinks that's very funny). Therefore, I was an "essential worker" during the pandemic. Whereas other people were sidelined from their work - either they were furloughed or they were able to work from home - mail carriers had to continue working and interacting with people. The drive to and from work was great when the lockdown happened, and at the time I was doing Uber Eats delivery as a second job and there was a lot of demand for that service, but the rest of it sucked. In the early days of Covid, no one knew how it was spreading and for awhile scientists thought it could live on the surfaces of objects, which meant that we were delivering mail and packages not knowing if we were going to get infected at some point. Later on, we discovered that wasn't the case but the fear that we all had in being a hands on worker was palpable and real. I was an early adopter when it came to wearing a mask, and I continued wearing one all the way through that year even though most of my fellow workers stopped doing it long before me. Every time a customer without a mask walked out of their house because they wanted to take the mail from me, it took everything within me to not scream "GET AWAY. I DON'T WANT YOUR GERMS. JUST LET ME DO MY JOB AND YOU CAN GRAB IT OUT OF THE MAILBOX WHEN I LEAVE!" The body is pretty good at inuring itself from past fear and trauma, but I do remember those days. I remember every time I felt a little sick if it was finally my time to get it. That year was crazy from a work perspective.
The second thing I'm processing is a relationship that took place during Covid. Right before the pandemic and the lockdown hit, my partner of a year and a half decided that she didn't want to be in a relationship with me anymore. But then because of what was happening around the world, she postponed the decision and we were still together through that year.
Big mistake.
Because she was romantically and emotionally detaching from me, I was caught in a limbo world where there were times where I felt like someone cared for me; but other times where I was being emotionally and psychologically abused. And because I didn't know she had planned on leaving me, it was a very confusing time where I blamed myself, that perhaps my actions weren't doing enough. I started starving for connection and intimacy, and was only being given breadcrumbs that would satiate me less and less the longer it went. This relationship has been over for awhile now, and it's only recently that I can look back and see all the signs. She finally did tell me what she had planned early 2000; however it was two years after the fact. I felt constantly like I was walking on eggshells during that time and no matter what I did, it was never enough nor was it appreciated. I recently came across this quote:
"Being able to feel safe with other people is probably the single most important aspect of mental health; safe connections are fundamental to meaningful and satisfying lives." - Bessel van der Kolk
I hope that if you haven't started your processing journey through the things that happened with Covid, that you do so as soon as you can. Why? Well, there's a chance that we may have another pandemic on our hands with the bird flu and you don't want to have to deal with two past crazy situations at the same time. As van der Kolk says:
"We have learned that trauma is not just an event that took place sometime in the past; it is also the imprint left by that experience on mind, brain and body. This imprint has ongoing consequences for how the human organism manages to survive in the present. Trauma results in a fundamental reorganization of the way mind and brain manage perceptions. It not only changes how we think and what we think about, but also our very capacity to think."
