I’ve tackled versions of this question before. My answers have been and will be unfolding for a while. I don’t pretend to fully understand all the strange currents that swept me along, even the ones that I somewhat chose to swim in.
I have also recently been feeling a deep sense of disgust for the entire Covid era and its peculiar anti-culture, and a desire to distance myself from it. This includes many of my own coping mechanisms, behaviours and choices from 2020 to early 2022.
Putting that aside for a moment.
One way I’ve changed is that I’ve become much more focused on how I keep myself entertained and fulfilled instead of expecting people or institutions outside of me to do this. I recognize that I am the most significant agent in my life, and my skills and choices are what most affect how engaged I am with life. This isn’t maybe a radical change but an intensifying of a belief that was always there.
It affects choices I make for myself and my children. For example, I feel much better paying for music lessons rather than paying to take them to concerts. The piano will always be there in our house to play, assuming we don’t knock it to pieces. I can’t on the other hand assume that a band or an orchestra or a ballet company will always be there. Maybe they will, maybe they won’t. Institutions that I imagined were stable and based on values that I share proved not to be during the Covid era.
In hindsight, that destabilization was probably the most unnerving part of 2020-2022. A totalizing structure was imposed from above, and it made all the other structures that constituted reality seem unreal. School, work, family, friendships: suddenly they all had to be arbitrarily restructured. There was some opportunity in this sudden restructuring: a chance to work collaboratively, do things differently, maybe even sometimes better. It was a fleeting moment though, because the proposed “solutions” quickly became more authoritarian and arbitrary (vaccine mandates and passports, laws intruding on private life and relationships.) I was left wondering, what is really real in the society I inhabit? I have had to rebuild my faith in society, from the ground up. And I have not gotten very far yet.
Crowded places are more likely to give me anxiety and are more likely to be places I avoid.
This doesn’t have much to do with fear of Covid directly, as I was never very afraid of catching Covid and not much affected by it when I finally did (in June of 2022).
It’s more a distrust for large groups of people that I did not choose and whose purpose I am not entirely sure of. After being deprived of more conventional opportunities for gathering together, it seems to me like something dark came loose in the psyche of a lot of people and coming together for more sinister purposes has become exciting and desirable. A crowd is a bit like a wildfire that might go rogue and consume whatever gets in its way.
I don’t want any of that scene, and I usually avoid any area of the city known for demonstrations or large gatherings. In my city that would be our downtown core and the bigger shopping malls.
I haven’t given up on the public square. But I’m in the process of re-imagining what it means to me and how I engage with it. Large abstract concepts like nation and democracy and social contract shattered around me like brittle, weathered concrete. I don’t know what “Canada” means anymore. Maybe I never did. If I was to vote based on emotion, I would probably vote for a separatist political party right now. (I try not to vote based on emotion.)
None of this is reason for pessimism or despair.
I’ve said this in different ways before, but the local has become much more important to me. The smaller groups I’m embedded in have more to do with my sense of who I am than larger abstract identities. This includes:
-School (mine and my daughters’)
-Dance communities (2)
-Work colleagues
-Friends (neighbourhood friends are closer relationships, but I’m trying to keep the further ones active too)
-Local places and business (small, not malls eek)
-Extended family
The catch word of Covid-19 was “social distancing”. I survived by doing the opposite: pulling people closer to me.
So was the pandemic and all the disturbing deconstruction of reality a time warp or void? Yeah maybe. It feels that way often, and it feels like the best thing to do is shove all those memories in the darkest corner I can find for them. But the better challenge is to shine a light onto that void and dare it to show what it can reveal.
*Of course, I can’t truly separate my experience of governments from my experience of the Covid-19 era. But I also factor in my experiences of individual people, some of which were also pretty disturbing. But, it’s easier to give individual people grace, which is another reason I keep my focus firmly on the local and personal. We’re all just trying to survive in our own ways: sometimes we aim rightly, sometimes not.
