I am someone who depends on her systems, my routines. The more stressed I am, the more rigid my adherence to my routines gets. My systems and routines and color-coded planned life is what allows me to, imperfectly, function in the world, as long as I don't have to do too long a day outside.
But for the last six, seven months my world has been turned upside down in small and large ways. When Nehi got sick this summer, all the little day to day routines fell apart. For the first time in eleven years we did not start out day with an early morning walk. When I thought it was a minor thing, when I thought she would recover, I tried resuming morning walks on my own. This lasted for a little bit, but once it became clear my time with her was short, so much shorter than I thought we'd have, by months, I stopped walking in the morning because I wanted all the time I could have with her.
Once I had to put her down, I felt even more adrift. My life for eleven years had been shaped around her. My entire schedule, the house I bought, where furniture was, the rugs, the layout, it seemed like there wasn't a single aspect that wasn't designed around her and without her I didn't know what my life looked like. I've spent the months since mostly feeling unmoored. Lost without much direction. In a lot of ways I've overcompensated by overworking, filling my time with work and foster kittens, and teaching. Rather than sit and deal with anything, the overwhelming feelings I've kept moving forward, adding more and more things to my plate to keep going.
It's been easy to do mainly because the world at large is suffering cascading failures. The global pandemic of Covid-19 last spring, the brief time this summer when I at least thought it would be okay, before everything got exponentially worse this fall, and then just kept getting worse. Healthcare failed. Support for housing, food, failed. Supply systems failed. Humankind failed. One thing that got highlighted for me over and over again was the individual actions that attempted to overcome these systematic failures- people starting Go Fund Mes for healthcare costs, to try and avoid evictions, pay for funerals. But it's not sustainable. You can't individually make up for systematic failures, yet it feels like that's exactly what has been going on for years.
Schools and education have not been teaching whole truths, hard truths, but individual teachers and bands of teachers have been providing models for what it can look like. People die because they can't afford life saving medicine, or don't seek medical help because they can't afford it, but some people are able to raise $20,000 in a Go Fund Me. We still have "firsts" for women, Black, Indigenous, Asian, Chican@, People of Color that are "celebrated" as they should be, but the institutional racism that has prevented them until now, makes even the "nows" so hard, is ignored. The "model minority" myth is repeated again and again. Racism still pervades all of our major structures, and more and more it is apparent the damagewhite supremacy inflicts, the power it wields. How there are two sets of rules, two sets of justice. And yet even with the last few months where I've seen so many events where I've thought "this is it, this is what changes things" and yet nothing.
I feel like in the face of so many systematic failures I should be doing something. I also feel like nothing I do can be enough. I feel powerless and ineffective. It all seems like too much. I have tried to focus on the things I can control. I've tried to focus on my students, my teaching. I've tried to be kind, aware, and reach out to Internet friends. But I have spent a lot of time feeling numb. Lacking the bandwidth to do much else.
For me at least, the loss of my own personal routines has made all of this worse. Fall semester didn't look like any semester before. After a long, stressful summer dealing with Nehi's cancer, trying to plan for every possible issue for fall and teaching with Covid, plus the start of fall semester where the workload felt overwhelming, it felt like my routines, the things I needed to function got cut from the list first. Then in October I fell in the shower and hurt my hip, putting an end to my morning walks and making sitting at my desk, on the couch, taking out the trash, anything really, hurt. It was a month before I could see a doctor. Another month before I could get in for an arthrogram and MRI, which showed no structural damage, only then a recommendation for physical therapy.
Yesterday my physical therapist cleared me to resume my morning walks. So this morning, for the first time in months I put on my trainers, my Fangoria sweatshirt, hat and gloves, wireless headphones and Billie Eilish station, and walked out my front door. It felt odd at first, like I'd forgotten how to work, like I was thinking about walking too hard. Soon enough though I was doing what I used to do, seeing the robins in the trees, enjoying the live oaks, feeling the strong north wind, the smell of pine needles. The emptiness of the hospital and community college campus I walked through and around. Two laps in and I started to feel some discomfort, my left hip and thigh and side started to feel sore, but I finished a third lap, paying close attention to if it got worse or hurt. It spread but I never had pain. I felt really good heading home.
It is important to me to reclaim this, to have this again. I usually walk 3-5 miles, every day barring pouring rain. Every morning I get up, make coffee, watch the news, and at 730a, put on my sneakers and grab my music and walk. I've missed it so much. It is where I work out blog posts, come up with ideas and answers on teaching and work through solutions to problems in articles or chapters. This hour or so of time is so important to me, and I felt pure joy this morning in having it back.
Having this part of my routine back is important. It makes me more capable of getting through my day. The same way my detailed planner, and notebooks, and color coding, and new Wonder Woman pens, help me get through it.
But as much as these routines make ME capable of getting through a day, they cannot overcome the cascading failures that are still occuring. My routines may make it easier for me to deal with the horrors of the outside world but they don't mitigate them and that is a struggle for me. I imagine it is a struggle for many of us. I think a lot of us, most of us, are trying to control our personal lives, and trying to make what we can control the best we can, since we can't control anything else. But how long does this go on? Human beings are not built to live with this kind of daily stress although certainly people society has marginalized have lived exactly like this for decades, centuries. Many people are just now experiencing things that the advantage of our race, class, gender, has protected us from.
There are conflicting signs about whether or not the cascade will stop and be reversed or if it's all going to implode. I worry that the world will return to status quo, pat themselves on the back for doing so, then just keep going. I worry that the systematic failures will continue but because of who they affect society will go back to not paying attention.
One thing I've noticed the last few months is I used to be a pretty hopeful person. I knew there was hate and evil in the world but I ultimately believed that humankind was decent, that we would work our way out. But we're in the middle of a global pandemic and people, not just one or two, but the majority it seems, are deciding that their vacation, their dinners out, their bar crawls, their Target runs, are more important than people's lives. And I just can't wrap my head around that. I cannot understand how someone can be so selfish, so hateful, so evil, to think that their personal wants are more important than someone's life, multiple lives. Not wearing a mask, flying on a plane, going out to eat, going shopping, don't just place these individuals in jeopardy, they place hundreds, thousands in jeopardy, in pain, result in death. How do people not care about that? How do people look at millions infect, hundreds of thousands dead and still think "my vacation is more important"?
If it were the rare one or two people, the exception and not the rule, I think I'd think differently. But every day the news is full of rising cases, full ICUs, rising death tolls, ambulances waiting 6, 7, 8 hours before a person can get help, or driving hours, sometimes out of state to a hospital not at capacity. Doctors, nurses, orderlies, sick, exhausted, drained, dead. Teachers, grocery store workers, people on the front lines, everyone forced into impossible situations because all the systems have failed. In some ways it is a situation unique to the United States of America. But not totally.
I do not understand it. I am terrified sitting in a doctor's office with people too close. I am terrified at people in the grocery store who refuse to wear masks or follow the right of way signs in aisles, or refuse to socially distance. I am scared I'm going to lose friends, family, colleagues, because of other people's selfishness. I'm scared and anxious all the time and yet it's like beng gaslit by society because we're all just expected to keep going, keep working. There is no time or space to stop, to grieve, to mourn, to shelter and try and recover, or at the very least conserve energy in just getting by. It feels like we all know the system is failing, us personally and society at large, we know the emperor has no clothes and just collectively we just keep on keeping on.
I do not understand.
I keep checking the test positivity rate in my county. Every day it's gone up. Today it was up to 19.1%. I'm going to physical therapy twice a week. I go grocery shopping once a week. Every few weeks I go to the shelter and trade our foster kittens. Other than that I don't leave the house. When I do I always wear a mask. I try as much as I can to stay away from people. Classes start in a couple weeks and I've tried to plan for safety. Reminded students to wear masks and socially distance in class. They were all great about complying last fall. I have two face to face classes, two online, and an independent study that will meet online. I've made all my office hours virtual for now. It just doesn't seem safe to hold them in a small office with no window that opens in an old building with poor ventilation. I designed classes and workloads with pandemic fatique and global catastrophes in mind. It all seems insufficient. I feel, like I did in the fall, that it cannot be enough, that I'm doomed to fall short.
Last fall many students said the routine of classes, coming to class, helped. Others said they didn't feel safe. I understand both. I was happy to stay home and work in sweats online. I was happy to have any semblance of normalcy going to campus.
The fact is that there are no guidelines for this. There is no right way. I think that centering kindness and care, I think placing the human beings in our lives at the center, is the way forward. I hope that as long as I'm doing that, I will make the right decisions for them, support them, at the very least not do additional harm. I don't know honestly. I can only hope that being aware, being reflective, helps and helps me make good decisions.
I know that vaccines are on the horizon, and despite the systematic failures with that roll out, there there is nonetheless an end in sight. I don't know what life looks like on the other side. I don't think anyone knows what the ultimate consequences and fall out will be from the unemployment, the evictions, the inequities, the death, the grief, the long-haulers. I think we will be reckoning with all of this for a very, very long time. The small part of me that still hopes hopes that as a society, as a people, we will use this opportunity to remake the structures and institutions and systems that failed us. But we've had a year and that opportunity many times over and each time we as a society, as a collective, have decided not to. So I don't know.
While it seems silly, I realized just how negative I was feeling, how much hope I'd lost, when the third season of Star Trek: Discovery premiered. Because Michael had such unwavering hope. With everything she had lost, literally, she started the season LOST in time and space, she never lost faith in larger institutions, that she'd find her crew, her family, and that it would all end up okay. I watched it and loved it but could not understand it. I know I used to. Star Trek has always been about hope. When I was younger it was always what I thought we could achieve. As I got older, each year that has passed, as we seemed farthr and farther away from ever reaching those ideals, I think I got sadder. Not depressed exactly but resigned I think. And resignation I think at its heart, at its core is the loss of hope.
I certainly want to have hope again past the small things I have control over, the classes I teach, the books I share, the students I teach.
I want to believe in big hope, big changes. It is the worst blow I think that the people fueled by lies and ignorance and hate seem to never run out of inspiration or energy to continue their destruction and rot. I know that there are lots of organizers and communities of people who have suffered the most and been marginalized and abused the most who never give up hope, who always fight, who saved themselves and we were lucky enough to be saved as a side effect.
I guess I want more.
I hope we as a society get a chance to get it.
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