At the beginning of quarantine, I read an article about how the new rules of coronavirus revealed what a sham so many of the habituated regulations we abide by are. Suddenly, rent could be frozen!, healthcare for all sounded tame!, heck even TSA let you travel with more than 3.4oz of liquid!—but only if it’s hand sanitizer. The world was already topsy-turvy, but it wasn’t yet entirely upside down, drained of all life force. We were still sort of fresh spring chickens under stay-at-home orders, eager to see the good where we could.
Today though, two or three months into quarantine, that same sense of rules being turned on their head has entered the realm of the personal: What actually *are* normal clothes? What is work? What does it feel like to be physically close to groups of people without feeling afraid for our or their safety? How do we maintain friendships? How do we celebrate? And how many of us have realized most of our social rituals center around a relentless frenzy of spending money, drinking alcohol, and finding endless ways to distract ourselves from the pain of experiencing an ongoing collapse of life as we know it (hello climate change, civil unrest, and late-stage capitalism—you haven’t gone away just because COVID came to town).
This stripping down leaves me with two stark questions: What is really important? What kind of life do I really want? It is a privilege to be able to ask and answer these questions from safety. And it’s also a reorientation of life as I know it: Without distractions, I consider the stories I’ve made up about the way things should be or have to be. I reassess which relationships are working and which should be let go, which projects serve my larger aims and which detract, which cultural narratives need to be dismantled and which upheld or rewritten. On days when the agoraphobia isn’t overwhelming, on nights when I can breathe steady, this is a fertile space of re-creation.
And that begins by acknowledging everything I made up, every story I told myself, that was told to me, to keep me in line, to maintain the status quo. There is no status anymore, no quo.
What am I gonna do about it? And you?
