It’s coming up on a year since the skies over San Francisco turned red because of smoke from wildfires in surrounding areas, an uncanny reminder of Sydney’s Black Summer of late 2019 and early 2020. Now there is different kind of grim echo, as Sydney goes further into lockdown in the grip of a new surge of coronavirus. Here in California we are cautiously taking off our masks and trying to remember how to talk to friends face to face.
Meanwhile, in a horrible reversal, I see my Sydney friends and family experiencing something like we did in March 2020, when the schools closed, the shelter-in-place order went into effect and there was no certainty about how long it would go on, and how bad it would get.
The uncertainty was the hardest part. It was a droning tension always there, even when it was drowned out for a moment by the sharp horror of hearing the latest death statistics or the numbing boredom of waiting in line for an hour to go to the supermarket. Just as it’s impossible for Sydney parents now to imagine having to “home school” for weeks, it was unthinkable for us in 2020 that schools could be closed for the whole of March and into April. We had returned to Berkeley from Sydney in February 2020; my teenager got to go back to school for all of two weeks before it shut. Surely he wouldn’t miss another month? Two months? The year dragged on, into June, past the end of the school year, and still the lockdown persisted. We passed so many milestones: one month; two months; a hundred days; two hundred; stopped counting.
Now, I read about year 12 students in Sydney studying for their final exams, untethered from all the usual supports and routines. We expect them to get their bearings, to find a way through, as if we actually believed the outrageous fiction that a Zoom meeting replicates a classroom. It feels as though there is no other choice.
I wish I had some excellent advice about how to survive this open-ended bad dream. I have some good recipes for play dough and slime to make at home with the kids, and a great recipe for a Sazerac cocktail, and a warning that drinking too many Sazeracs with a twist of Covid stress may send you to the emergency room with an incipient stomach ulcer, and then all you will be able to drink at cocktail hour is a white chalky liquid called “Geri-lanta”.
The lessons learned from this time are still unfolding, and I have a sense that I may have been a bad student. I refused to uncritically celebrate “resilience” when it seemed like just another word for accommodating the impossible, inhuman demands of capitalism. I despise toxic positivity and have railed against “radical acceptance” even as circumstances compelled me to bow to inevitability in many forms. My teenager rarely finds internet things as funny as I do, but he loved a cartoon that passed across my social media recently: a woman lying on the road in the way of a huge semi-trailer with the caption: “Accept the things you can’t control”, a mantra he has come to detest after 18 months of not being able to go to school.
Other people proudly embarked on reading Proust while I watched my capacity for concentration evaporate, along with any sense of time, after a few weeks in lockdown. Our spirited four-year-old did not know how to sit in front of a Zoom screen for hours a day in remote learning-mode preschool, and after two weeks of feeling like a failure as parents, we gave up. Every day I accepted the further radical contraction of possibility for my own writing, watched my own experience map onto the statistics of women everywhere giving up paid work. Was I laying my body down in front of the oncoming truck? Trying to pull my children out of its path? There is still no way of knowing.
There must be a German compound word by now for the peculiar feeling of begrudging when others complain about their lockdown which does not seem to be as bad as your own. I watch my exhausted Melbourne friends fume about the way the Sydney lockdown is represented in the media as the worst thing ever. In one meme, Mel Gibson sits in jeans next to a bruised and bloody Jesus wearing a crown of thorns, an image from the set of Gibson’s movie about Christ with the caption: “Sydney talking to Melbourne about lockdown.”
Where would California be in this picture, I wonder? I imagine a woman standing at the edge of the image, almost out of frame, in front of a pile of 500,000 dead bodies, maybe a field of crucified victims, or giant refrigerated morgue trucks. She’s wearing a kind of tired “hold my beer” expression, and she’s been standing there for 400 and something days, and her feet and heart are alternately numb and unbearably sore.
This feeling of resentment, this competitive suffering, shows itself to me as another face of the trauma of lockdown. It is yet another way in which this whole nightmare tests our capacity for compassion — for others, for ourselves.
The only insight I trust to pass along is this: There are no happy lockdowns. But every lockdown is unhappy in its own way. Whatever your lockdown experience is, it belongs to you, and no one else can really understand it. The unforeseeable hardship of disconnection. The moments when your sense of self-satisfaction that you are helping others by staying home runs dry, and you just feel lonely, or angry, or helpless, or completely freaked out by the quiet streets, or filled with grief at the loss of things that seem trivial but turn out to be anything but.
Those things are coming back into view for us here, thanks to the vaccine. The things we took for granted, like an open door at the local library, or a playground not blocked by hazard tape like a crime scene.
Every unhappy lockdown has its own, unpredictable moments of delight in small things. My social media pages are filled with pictures of pink magnolias, excessively, outrageously pretty and short-lived, impatient for spring, photographed by Sydney friends on their brief excursions from home. The impulse to document these fleeting moments feels familiar — not to paper over the difficulty, but to accept a momentary interruption of joy alongside it. I came to embrace that impulse: at some point about a hundred days in, it stopped feeling like denial. The indifference of the natural world to human suffering has never felt so comforting. Terrifying, humbling, and sometimes accidentally beautiful.
