2020 is a year to feel it all
A list of moments I remember crying this year:
After the first time I walked into a grocery store and saw the rows of empty shelves under fluorescent lights. No bread, no paper towels, no toilet paper, no soap, no disinfectant, no hand sanitizer, no flour, no chicken broth, no beans, no cold medicine.
After reading a NYT piece about a 29-year-old doctor who died in Wuhan after caring for hundreds of COVID-19 patients, and another 29-year-old healthcare worker in the same hospital who contracted the virus and barely survived after harrowing weeks hovering close to death.
The first time I walked by a park in our neighborhood and saw yellow police tape syphoning off the playground, and a sign posted by the city of Oakland announcing that the park was closed to the public.
After reading a NYT piece written by doctors in Italy, trying to warn the world about the devastating reality they were facing, and the reality they knew other parts of the world would soon face.
After the Imperial College report was published, and my husband realized it could be years before he was able to see his family in Canada again.
After the first time I talked to my parents on the phone and my mom sounded scared.
After reading a NYT piece about doctors working in overwhelmed emergency rooms and intensive care units in New York City, with images of portable morgue refrigeration trucks in hospital parking lots and mass burial sites in city parks on Hart Island.
After watching a video confessional by an ER doctor working double shifts while a babysitter watches her three kids at home, crying while she sits in her car in the driveway because she’s so exhausted and doesn’t know how she will muster the strength to go inside and tuck her kids into bed.
The day that two of our closest friends in Oakland moved home to the Midwest to be closer to their family.
The first time I listened to the new Phoebe Bridgers album.
When I told my therapist that I’d been waking up at 4:00am in a state of hyper vigilance for two months, and that I’d lost twelve pounds without getting any exercise.
When I read Glennon Doyle’s Untamed and Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.
After I got a push notification about the horrific killing of George Floyd.
After I got a push notification about the brutal killing of Breonna Taylor by police, in her own bed in the middle of the night.
After I got a push notification about police paralyzing Jacob Blake as a result of shooting him seven times in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
After I got a push notification about a 17-year-old white supremacist who shot and killed two protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
After reading Anne Helen Peterson’s piece, Habituation to Horror.
After reading Jesmyn Ward’s beautiful and devastating piece in The Atlantic, On Witness and Respair: A personal tragedy followed by a pandemic.
When I woke up a few days ago and looked out my window at a dark, burnt orange sky plucked from the scenes of a dystopian sci-fi film.
When I walked out on our deck yesterday morning to water the plants before work, and ash covered everything.
After reading this list, it may surprise you to learn that I’m a person who has trouble letting myself feel the hard feelings. Somewhere along the way, I learned that it was a bad thing to feel anxious, frightened, upset, angry, or vulnerable. Maybe even a dangerous thing.
So I honor the great American tradition of avoiding and repressing these feelings. And as anyone who has ever watched a Sam Mendes film knows, no good can come of that. I also happen to be an incredibly sensitive person, so for me, one of the more obvious consequences of repressing hard feelings is the sudden outpouring of tears. Eventually the lid on that jar of hard feelings pops off. It is a physiological response to which I have grown accustomed. And when my body has had enough, there will be no more controlling the pesky ducts at the corners of my eyes. When I cry, I cry hard. I hate it. It is my least favorite activity (as my husband and therapist can both attest). But too much has been stored up, and that lid has been popping a lot since March.
The thing is 2020 has given us a lot to repress and compartmentalize, to be revisited at a future, undetermined date. A global pandemic has claimed nearly one million lives in eight months, and those are just the ones tagged in a database. Most who have died have done so without the presence of their loved ones. America continues to grapple with a legacy of systemic racism, and Black people are still being killed by police. Our President feeds the flames of division and hate in order to distract us from his failures to protect us and his attempts to steal the forthcoming election. Hurricanes and wildfires are decimating communities already in pain, turning the skies unnatural shades of pale green and dark orange, filling the air with smoke and debris. And to keep our friends and family safe, we dare not get close to them, touch them, or hug them.
I mean, fuck. We cannot possibly feel it all in the moment. How would we survive?
It. is. just. too. much.
But what will happen to us if we file it all away to be felt later?
I remember, as a kid, going to South Carolina to visit my grandmother, and opening her pantry to look for snacks. Every time, I would find more nonperishable goods than any single human living alone could possibly consume before they expired. In fact, one need only turn over a can to see the proof — at least half of the food she had in that thing was kept years beyond their expiration dates.
On one summer visit, my parents went out to dinner while my brother and I stayed home with our grandmother who, at the time, was prone to spoiling us in the warm and generous way that grandmothers spoil grandchildren. She always made a big fuss over us, played with us, engaged us in conversation, and insisted we call her Grandmommy (all these years later, it’s still how we all refer to her). She was eager to make us happy, and told us she’d make us whatever we wanted to eat for dinner. I requested a grilled cheese sandwich (grilled cheese is one of my favorite comfort foods to this day), and she happily obliged. But she made it with American cheese. I was six years old, and what grown ups would call “a picky eater.” I’d never eaten American cheese, because my parents’ house was a sharp cheddar house. When I pushed the plate away and said that I didn’t want to eat it, Grandmommy firmly pushed it back, and told me to do as I was told and clean my plate. I refused —whiningly as I recall — and without skipping a beat she leaned over the counter, pulled me toward her by the neck of my t-shirt, and slapped me hard across the face. My mother was furious when she got home, and Grandmommy never hurt me again.
My grandmother was a deeply traumatized person. She was born in 1919, and grew up in Charleston, South Carolina during the Great Depression. She lost one sibling to endocarditis at the age of nine, and another from burns in a kitchen accident at the age of two. And her early adulthood was shaped by the experience of World War II, during which time she worked as a nurse. She married my grandfather just after he returned from serving as a Navy Officer in the South Pacific, where he had lost an eye to shrapnel from an explosion that occurred when a Kamikaze crashed into his ship. Later in life, she lost another sibling — this time a brother, who shot himself with a rifle. I never heard her speak about any of these things.
The pantry wasn’t always full of expired goods because she was absent-minded. And she didn’t slap me because I was a horrible child who deserved to be punished for not eating her dinner. Or because she was an evil, old witch, or even a bad person. My grandmother just never found a way to process the many intensely overwhelming emotional experiences she had decades before I was born. And those feelings can’t stay inside forever —they have to come out. As an adult, I‘ve come to understand that I saw the very least of it.
I don’t want to end up like my grandmother. I don’t want this time to harden me. And I don’t want to pass trauma down to the next generation. I want to look back on this awful, terrible year, and remember how resilient I was, how much I learned to appreciate the small things that I too often took for granted, and how I helped others to just. get. through it.
I hope to look back on this year and remember it as the time I began to unlearn the practice of filing away big hard feelings, and instead learned to let them pass through me. As I said, I’m an incredibly sensitive person. So I already know that feeling all the feels will mean plenty more tears. But I think I’m very slowly learning to be okay with that. That is a cost I can accept.
There’s a poem from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, called “Go to the Limits of Your Longing.” I find that I keep returning to this poem as a meditation, especially when I start to do that whole character-from-a-Sam-Mendes-film thing. There are two lines that have rightly gotten a lot of love from popular culture in the last few years (you know which ones I’m talking about if you’ve ever perused prints of inspirational quotes on Etsy…or seen the ending to Taika Waititi’s gorgeous, funny, and heartbreaking film, Jojo Rabbit).
But the full poem is rarely referenced, and very worth your time. I hope it brings you the courage and resolve to feel it all, and to keep going, as it has for me.
It goes like this:
God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.
These are the words we dimly hear:
You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.
Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.
Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.
Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.
Give me your hand.