How We Got Here
By: Sabrina Cognata
Tags: Survival, Trauma, Return, Life, Surviving

If there’s one thing I know how to do, it’s survive. You can’t teach someone to have the unbridled will to live. I should know. I’ve survived so many insane things, but right now only a few big ones come to mind: the Northridge Earthquake, being held hostage, breaking my neck, and my childhood at large. It’s weird when you spend your whole life destroying everything in your path when your only aim is yourself. And you live. Like you just completely overstep the bounds of reality and you wake to experience a new day. But if you are lucky like me and survive that phase of your life you’ll have tools that can help you keep going. Tools normal, everyday people simply-do-not-have.

I knew 2020 was going to be a shit show. I just wasn’t quite sure what kind of shit show. I was aware it was hopefully the final year that the big orange idiot would be in office, but there was no guarantee. In mid-January, a friend of mine sent me a very long text message, which included a note from her brother. Her brother is in imports and exports in mainland China and in his note, he described what seemed like insanity. There was a plague in Wuhan and shit was not good, dude. He’s German so it was a brief, for of “We’re fucked,” before he steamrolled into everything he thought his sister would need to know to make it through the year once this great plague hit the United States.

Part of me was like, “There’s no way that this is real,” but another part of me. The part that has survived some of the wildest shit known to man was like, “Better start checking shit off this list.” Things like stocking up on toilet paper and taking care of repairs for anything where a part will have to come from China sounded pretty basic. But he also said to stock up on cold meds and to wear a facemask. This is waaaaaay back in January. I bought one extra pack of TP and ordered a bidet from Amazon. If the great plague didn’t hit at least it would be easy to rinse my vagina off during my period. The plague did come as I learned to enjoy a steady spritz to my neither region. Life is odd like that.

While we were learning to live in microcosms of the world we once knew, I was mostly indulging in escapist behaviors that have saved me thousands of times as I did not have to worry too much about planning for the apocalypse. I’d already done that. However, none of the things I did to bide the time was write. People I know would ask me why I wasn’t producing some great novel or finally jotting down the benign passages of life as a 2000s party relic, but the simple answer was, I didn’t want to.

Instead of forcing myself to come up with something to put in print, I allowed myself to simply do what I needed to survive. That’s the trick with making it through something that changes who you are at your core. You have to learn when you have nothing else to give and frankly, I knew right away that I didn’t have much. So I didn’t write. I didn’t even think about writing if I wasn’t getting paid for it. In my free time, I mostly did things that give me great pleasure like daydream, look at art, smoke weed, work out, read, and talk shit on Tinder.

And I provided myself with the peace of mind to do those things by keeping a pretty steady schedule. At the beginning of the pandemic, when it was weird and scary, I had to be out of bed by 9 am. Right now, I try to be out of bed at the very latest 7 am. I start working at some point between 8 am and 9 am, and I work until I am done. Which is usually around 3 pm. After 3 pm I workout and run any errands I have. In the summer I was working out by 6:30 pm and did errands before then. I definitely didn’t try to bog myself down with any social obligations and not even because of Covid. Simply because I knew that hearing another person complain about anything would result in a body count.

Anyways, I used to be cool. We already know it. I used to do cool stuff and left everyone always wondering WTF constantly. I don’t even see people anymore. But I do have the time (in between daydreaming and eye rollin’ Tinder) to add some of my own content to medium…in the very least as a weekly post. So this is my pledge to you, to like write and stuff. About my cool life or the uncool parts and definitely about weed and whatever I’ve been daydreaming about.

Pandemic is hard. Being quarantined is hard. Being alive is hard. And watching the world as we knew it crumble before our eyes is fucking hard. But there is always life after tragedy. If you’ve never done this before, welcome. Please leave here today knowing that once you get through this you’ll have the tools to survive anything. Just. Like. Me.