healing is 2020
By: Chuck Friend
Tags: New Years Resolutions, Healing, 2020, Healing From Trauma, Covid 19

photo collage by charlotte friend for “healing is 2020”

It’s not just a year. I think we all know that deep down, but our concept of time never had a fail safe for something like 2020. Our working model of life is supposed to flow in a linear fashion like our education system, economy, and everything else that builds our expectations of productivity without factoring in our imperfect humanity.

For the past 10 months I’ve been telling myself that I should be grieving more. That there’s somehow enough psychological processing I could do to…what exactly? If I can’t even finish the sentence then I must already be misconstrued. None of us had any memory file in our mind to reference when trying to process what the hell was going on in March 2020. Even us disabled folks only really had metaphors and anxieties about a world so unwelcoming and unhealthy for us.

We did, however, have the wisdom in March that these “lockdowns” weren’t going anywhere because the “healthy” population was carrying on like they’d never heard a doctor say, “I don’t know how to heal you.” I keep trying to process and grasp the losses this year has incurred, but my mind is still in survival mode. Just because I’m no longer sanitizing my groceries or microwaving the mail doesn’t mean my brain has lowered its vigilance. It still tracks everything I touch and whispers, “wash your hands for an hour.”

I have a theory that even anti-maskers are unconsciously terrified of the virus. Sure they were fed misinformation, but the reality they chose to curate and believe was much easier to live with than accepting the facts of a virus we knew nothing about. And once the ground broke on “not worse than the flu,” there was no going back for them. We like answers. We were told that answers will keep us safe and get us from point A to point B. But in March, all we had were questions, comments, and concerns which got us nothing short of toilet paper (haha).

I’m assuming if you’re reading this then you believe Covid-19 is a real threat that has utterly devastated our country. It’s not likely for people who deny facts that contradict their personal narrative to be emotionally intelligent. However, that’s not to say anti-maskers, Tr*mp supporters, and the like don’t have emotions that inform their decisions on some level. That demographic reminds me of who I was in high school. Not politically, but emotionally.

When I was 16 I did not know what an emotion was. I worked for months with my first therapist just to be able to recognize the sensations I felt in my body and the pictures I drew for her represented my feelings. She called me a robot because any emotion that dared arise within me was deemed a virus threatening my current software/narrative/reality. I simply couldn’t deal with something that didn’t fit perfectly into what I was told the world was supposed to be. I also spent a lot of time and energy blaming other people and engaging in harmful activities.

But just because I did everything I could to deny myself of my emotions doesn’t mean they simply didn’t exist. Quite the opposite as one might assume; they ended up completely boiling over…which is what made all the adults in my life go, “okay, wait this girl needs therapy.” And thank goodness I’ve been getting my brain shrunk for 9 years now because a minute less and this year would have been impossible for me to survive.

Even if we’ve been doing emotional work and cultivating awareness of our mental health in regards to the pandemic and all of its tragedies, I believe this year will be an experience that haunts our psyches for generations to come if we don’t continue to heal and work with the information garnered. It’s a lot, I know. I’m still unsure how I’m going to be able to work through it all myself.

It seems impossible to enjoy a crowded bar ever again. But am I getting ahead of myself in trying to predict how I’ll react to being back to “normal”? And is the greatest danger in the myth of “returning” to “normalcy”? Back in March, I knew the world would be forever changed and if we were to move on as if nothing had happened, it would be at our own detriment. Even if you haven’t taken a moment to contemplate the immense shifts we’ve experienced this year, that doesn’t mean your body and subconscious haven’t been feeling them — nothing gets past that dynamic duo, nothing!

So whether or not any of us attempt to process, heal, and integrate the trauma, information, and truths we’ve all experienced during the pandemic, they will be present in our consciousness to some degree. And I believe it’s going to be up to us to rebuild communities that take into account the trauma we all share and carry individually. Nothing heals when we look away from it; our government taught us that this year.

Of course I can’t predict what this new world is going to look, feel, or taste like, but I know it’s going to require a helluva lot more patience, listening, and introspection. As a culture, we will all be better off integrating this year into our personal story — unpacking all that we can and knowing our perspective has been forever changed.

We all have a unique role to play that can be found through plenty of curiosity. It seems almost too simple to say that healing ourselves heals the whole community. But when we can hold our own truths with compassion, non-judgment, and validity, it is much harder to resent and criticize anyone else for trying their best to live their truth with the facts they have been given.

And we’re going to get it wrong at least some of the time. We are humans, after all, not just pixels in a zoom app.