As we plod along, confused, scared and hurt together in a world that will potentially never be the same, Anna Rawhiti-Connell sees small chinks of light in the presence of people carrying on despite not knowing where we are headed
Wednesday, July 21, 2021 started as an utterly unremarkable day. Not just unremarkable, but actually quite awful. It was one of those depths of winter days and a familiar panic greeted me as soon as I woke up. "I am flailing."
Winter is not my season. It’s when depression slips in and begins its creep, a wisp of smoke under the door. Silently at first, the descent is almost undetectable, until it’s not. I’ve beaten it these past few years but still feel as if I'm running a race against it. I stay one step ahead by diligently adhering to the ‘before it gets bad’ plan, eating my broccoli and cycling on a stationary bike to nowhere and anywhere, as long as it is not there.
I sent a tweet that morning about the neighbour’s banana tree and a Lauris Edmond poem. What I really wanted to do was scream and see if others would join me. What I really wanted to do was ask if anyone else woke up at 3am and was instantly swallowed by the darkness and crushed by dread. Was anyone else bouncing thoughts back and forth as if trapped in the tightest parallel park, forever reversing a centimetre back and moving a centimetre forward?
A parade of a thousand people and their bags of hurt marched through my head and were soon joined by incantations that seem long past their use by date. ‘Perspective and gratitude, Anna’ ‘Health and a home, Anna’ ‘Friends and family that are here, Anna’ ‘Broccoli and exercise, Anna’. I repeat these things to myself on a daily basis. The ridiculous and rhythmic regularity of it reminds me of my Grandfather, who used to make us laugh by doing the sign of the cross while saying ‘Spectacles, testicles, wallet and watch’ before leaving the house.
These constant attempts to recalibrate and do the things we’re told to do for our “wellbeing” in the face of uncertainty and perilous times increasingly feel like self-flagellation. They are attempts to off-set my own feelings in the face of guilt about our good fortune, our relative safety, our Fortress New Zealand. They are not incorrect or ill-advised attempts, nor is there any doubt about the way we have come through these times so far, but right now, I feel as if I am making them in a bid to build armour for skin that is too thin. Everything is landing harder and cutting deeper.
Giving these early morning thoughts any credence would usually break a cardinal rule of mine. Nothing good can come of paying any real attention to them. It is when I feel most alone and most helpless. I also work alone a lot of the time and without the usual divisions of time, and diversions of a commute and a workplace, these thoughts can stay with me until I actively do something to dislodge them. It’s why I have a necessary regimen of circuit breakers. These usually reassure me that the way I’m feeling isn’t representative of anything other than too much time in the company of my own thoughts.
One of these circuit breakers is a very obvious counter to that: spend time with other people. Trying to outrun what I thought was the arrival of my familiar but unwelcome winter lodger, I’ve spent the last week making the effort to catch up with people. The solace I usually find in doing that was still there but it had a distinctly different flavour.
From the minute I sat down with people, in the exchange of the usually perfunctory ‘How are you’, there was an instant mirroring of my own feelings and thoughts. Their dread, worry, anger, hurt and anxiety all bubbled to the surface quickly. They were also waking at 3am feeling alone and helpless. They were worried about the world their kids were growing up in and most of all, they were grappling with the realisation that this pandemic is not a blip and that there will be no return to the ‘before’.
Even as we lumber towards being a highly vaccinated population, the border will not be thrown open. The future is not only uncertain but perilous and the hope that this pandemic might have been a tidy full stop to one era, heralding the arrival of a new, better one, is impossible to hold onto without also acknowledging that we will first go through an as yet undefined period of fall-out, pain and incredibly uncomfortable change.
Many of us woke up on New Year’s Day, buoyed by the simple fact it was no longer 2020. As it turns out, 2021 hasn’t delivered the bookend we were hoping for. Instead we are dwelling in the in-between, slowly grieving for what was before with no real certainty of what lies ahead. And it is awful.
Like many writers, I’ve penned my fair share of optimistic tracts about a possible post-pandemic renaissance over the last 18 months. I’ve gripped onto observations about what happened after world wars and found comfort in the smallest mention of another ‘roaring 20s’. I’ve drawn on just about every tool in the ‘control what you can’ toolbox and clutched at every straw. And I am tired. I am tired of constantly oscillating between despair and ‘putting things in perspective’. I am tired of my gratitude meditations, tired of broccoli and tired of feeling like everything I’m doing is no longer in the service of forward momentum but a bid to hang on by my fingernails. I am tired of straining to see certainty where there is none and it seems many of you are too.
But hope, as many have said, is necessary and though I can clearly see that it is not yet apparent in this column, there is perhaps some in just being able to acknowledge that I now feel less alone. Perhaps there is hope that you do too. Perhaps the hope we require will not burst forth or blaze bright but appear as chinks of light as we plod along, confused, scared and hurt together in the in-between, without sight of the end we hoped for but within sight of each other.
Perhaps it is in knowing that many of us are just sitting in the soup, oscillating wildly, uncomfortably awash in ambivalence and uncertainty and still doing our best not to succumb to our worst instincts. Perhaps there is hope to be found in the idea that this state we’re in, no matter how awful it feels, is a counteraction against those who are maleficently sowing seeds of division from political and media pulpits, tempting us into the easy relief of laying blame and polarised thinking.
My unremarkable Wednesday in July was bookended by getting my first dose of the vaccine. I cried while waiting in the queue. I wish I could tell you that I cried because I felt an enormous surge of hope or saw a glimmer of the end in sight - but it wasn’t that. It was the half-eaten supermarket pizza bread on the desk of one of the staff. It was the guy whose job it was to seat you after your vaccination, and his funny hat. It was the awful mall in which the centre is located, the name tags and the bulk order purple t-shirts of the vaccinating workforce. It was the series of unremarkable events and interactions that did me in. People just doing their job, rolling up their sleeves and trying to carry on. One foot in front of the other, tentatively plodding on, trying to do the right thing in the face of uncertainty.
Perhaps for now, it is on unremarkable and awful days, in the presence of people who are carrying on despite not knowing where we are headed, that the smallest chinks of light are found and the tiniest hope can be harvested.
