The Way We Were
When I haven’t been panicked by the rising Christian terrorism in our country my thoughts have turned to time. At the risk of sounding like a spinoff in the Marvel Universe, time seems to have a whole new shape for me. No longer a straight line, sometimes it’s dots and dashes: self-contained moments with a finite ending, or brief bursts of joy. Other times, it’s a circle, a never-ending loop of monotony or despair, like a gridlocked highway you can’t reach the exit ramp on.
More than ever, I feel as if a curtain has fallen over life pre-March 2020. Nearly 2 ½ years later, my life before no longer seems like just a memory, but like something I have to struggle to recall. Conversely, everything that happened after that moment feels like one long year. 2020 is not almost 3 years ago, but still happening, every year we’ve had since then just one more month in it.
There are times lately when I feel like an amnesiac, remembering something I used to do before all of this. “These are people I used to see. These are things I did.” In some ways it’s nice; there’s a joy to the rediscovery. But like someone actually suffering from a brain injury, I’m frustrated and confused by my lack of progress. Why does everything still seem so foreign? Why am I still remembering things? It’s no longer the routine of things that I’ve forgotten – what may have been disrupted and changed in the course of the pandemic – but actual events are starting to go, too. I know these things happen as we get older, but it’s really feeling like someone just wiped my hard drive, deleting all the files created before 2020.
Meanwhile, things I experienced since then may have happened last week, or two years ago. Some days it’s hard to tell. Living in southern California the weather is often no help in trying to place it on a timeline. Sometimes it helps to recall if we were social distancing or wearing masks. I wish this was a mind-blowing multiverse movie. I fear it’s just mind-numbing aging.
Maybe I’m just looking for a really cool reason to explain really mundane things: boredom, a lack of energy, and no longer giving a fuck. I’m in a pattern and frankly, there’s not much I’m willing to allow to take me out of it. In some ways it’s a good pattern: I’ve really prioritized my work. When writing comes first, I’m protective of that time and energy; everything else has to come second. But at other times I’m loathe to take a ten minute drive to pick something up and it occurs to me, “This may not be right.”
I even try to make it make sense with a list.
1. We are different people.
Ok, sure I guess.
2. We are older.
This seems valid, if depressing.
3. We have had a trauma?
I know we have, but it seems dramatic to say out loud: The adult version of “Quit crying or I’ll give you something to cry about.” Stop telling me about how trauma has changed your brain, or I’ll show you what real trauma is.
In conversations with friends, I learn I’m not alone. They confess to me that there’s places they never went back to since the pandemic, for reasons they can’t quite say. Or friends they haven’t been in contact with because it’s now been too long and they don’t have the energy to “catch up.” A friend recently explained to me that being with someone you hadn’t seen in awhile could make you worry if they were having a good time and that led to you not enjoying yourself. Another friend has said they have forgotten how to talk to people.
I’ve been burying myself in the writing (and rewriting) of my new book (To Lie in the Sun, out sometime this fall) and as I was finishing it up to send to the proofreader, I realized that a theme of the book could be impermanence and coming to terms with that. Impermanence was also a big lesson of the last few years. Plans had to change; variants came and went; behavior was modified. We lost rights. We saw our democratic institution so close to being overthrown - and not for lack of trying. The world looks and feels a lot different than it did three years ago. Maybe the reason we’re averse to changing things up is because we’ve already had our fill of it. Maybe that’s why I don’t want to take a ten minute drive. And maybe that’s OK.
A few weeks ago I was reminded that when in doubt, set a boundary. I think we tend to look at boundaries as big caps, bold letters, serious life stuff. “I won’t be around you when you’re using,” types of things. But boundaries can also be small stuff. It’s just recognizing our own limitations and expressing them to people for our own mental and physical health. “I’m sorry, but I have to make this Zoom a phone call.” “I can’t pick that up. Do you ship?” “It’s not personal, I just need some alone time.” Boundaries can be instruction manuals for others. “I don’t feel like talking right now. Do you mind if we watch a movie?” Or “I’m having a hard time with crowds so I’m going to pass. But I’d really like to see you one on one.”
Of course, I say all of this as a person who has been known to fall asleep at my own table because I don’t want the party to stop and don’t know how to tell others it has to. Boundaries can be a motherfucker. And I think part of the reason is that it requires us to do some processing. To ask ourselves what we really need. And that can be hard to figure out.
But I also know that when someone gives me a boundary, I am grateful. I care about them and want to know how to make what they’re going through easier. And I know when I do finally set one for myself, it will make things easier for me, too.