Writing These Anxieties
When the lockdown started, I tried to learn as much as possible about this virus, its transmission, and the situation in Canada. I’m trained as a scientist, after all. I opened a spreadsheet, bookmarked the government of Canada website which provided real-time updates on infection spread, and began plotting graphs and observing trends. For the first week, this felt like a sober response. But I noticed that excessive news consumption had a negative effect on my second vocation: writing.
Two years ago, I had started a book-length project which I committed to work on for three hours, Monday to Friday, without fail. But this new rhythm—of beginning my day reading coronavirus news and WhatsApp forwards from aunties worried about conspiracy theories and ventilator scarcity—made progressing with this project a challenge.
As the pandemic worsened, I would stare at the empty page as my mind drifted. I was thinking about my immediate family. We’re spread across five countries. I’m the only one in Toronto. How long will travel restrictions last? Four of them are in the US; do they need masks? My cousin is on the frontlines in New Jersey; will he be OK? When will I see any of them again?”
Reading the available scientific information didn’t stop these lingering questions. After a few days of this cycle—news consumption followed by distraction and blank pages—I put aside my compulsion to know and to figure out. But instead of attempting to bypass my COVID-19-induced concerns about the future, I turned my pen towards the chaos lurking beneath the questions. I began each day by writing the uncertainties and questions out of me, exposing them. In doing so, I cleared the way for other words to flow. And I remembered important truths I’d forgotten.
I’ve found it helpful to remember that previous generations have faced catastrophe. Catastrophe, from the Greek katastrophē, means overturning, or sudden turn. The literal translation of the word implies disorientation. Catastrophe turns worlds and world views, perspectives and aspirations, on their sides. The COVID-19 pandemic is teaching us this.
When these unexpected storms scatter all that has been gathered for so long, anxieties and uncertainty about the future may be overwhelming. In our media-saturated world, we can avoid confronting this discomfort, entering into a state of self-inflicted distraction, forfeiting our agency, and forgetting that how we respond to the circumstances in our lives is the only thing we’ve ever had control of. But this isn’t our only option. We can also hope.
In Hope in the Dark, Rebecca Solnit makes the case that hope requires clarity. The stories she shares, about seemingly impossible social situations being transformed, one action at a time, provide a strong reminder that the future is not inevitable and that those who choose hope amid difficulty, have to look beyond the catastrophic situations they face. In other words, hope requires imagination.”
It is undeniable; life is changing. How we get through “this”, however long this social distancing, these new work arrangements and travel restrictions last, is dependent on so much beyond our control. But although COVID-19 has been catastrophic, it cannot destroy all that is good. My close friend lost her grandma one week after the lockdown began. She could not go home to attend the funeral. I could not go to her apartment to hug her. I called her instead. We chatted. We prayed. Someone else delivered food for her. Her church sent flowers last week. She sends me updates with teary-eyed emojis and hearts, and we’ve concluded, more decisively than before, that people are wonderful. Social distancing can’t stop love. Maybe this has always been true. I feel as though I am seeing anew.
This pandemic has brought our world to its knees in surrender to what has always been and will remain true: Humanity is fragile. We love people whose lives we do not hold in the palms of our hands. We are intimately connected to all that is alive, seen, and unseen. And sometimes it is what we don’t see and are inattentive to that hold the most power to uproot our lives. We must face this vulnerability. I am facing it first, as a writer.
I have reduced the time I spend consuming news in order to confront my emotions honestly and respond well to this catastrophe because I believe that this moment requires something of me, even though I don’t know what happens next. And what it requires—which is to say what I commit to doing and being—depends upon the type of future that I envision. I am also aware that I do not control the outcome. Only God knows when next I will sit on the beach in Barbados as my younger sister leads me and the rest of her class in stretches to improve our health. Or when next I will walk the Atlanta Beltline with my big sister and brother-in-law. But hope is more concerned with remembering that all that is happening now is not all that is possible. It is remembering that people, in times past, have taken one breath, one step forward, wrote poems, danced, said one prayer, and loved their neighbor amid hurricanes and wars. Their actions spoke a better word than catastrophe. As I’ve spent time remembering this, one thing has become clear; hope is wholehearted, requiring commitment.
Writing is my hopeful response to COVID-19. I am writing to change the conversation in my head because that changes my perspective on what is happening outside of it. I am writing because creating something new presupposes the future. Writing into and through and about COVID-19 presupposes a future in which all that is written would exist to tell stories of a thing of the past. Writing not only provides the clarity I need to hope, but it also shows me how to keep at this wholehearted act.
In a pandemic, fear can become commonplace, part of our subconscious language. And if it is true that “language creates us,” as author Marilynne Robinson has said, then I’m writing to create in the image of hope in the middle of this catastrophe. And I am hoping for hope's sake because regardless of the outcome, which no one knows, wholehearted engagement in imagining and working toward a good future will always be more life-giving than the alternative.
Text: Jasmine Hamilton