behind the scenes: I am unmoored and paralyzed by polycrisis

Hello! How are you coping in our crashing polycrisis? Haha LOLsob, I am not doing well at all.

Big sign: after announcing last week two weeks ago that I was back — back to work, back to writing — and had big plans to post lots of stuff, I ended up doing almost nothing but writing and rewriting this one damn essay over and over again, just spinning my wheels with it and getting nowhere.

(If you’re reading this it means that I’ve finally posted it, which also means that maybe I’m on an upswing again. Stay tuned, haha LOLsob.)

It’s not laziness or procrastination that’s stopping me. I’m not depressed… or, rather, I am depressed, but it’s the situational kind, because *waves hands around at the state of the world.* Everything is just so completely fucked, and I’m in such despair.

Pandemic denial. Antivax nonsense. Rising fascism. Climate collapse. Rapacious, vampiric endstage capitalism. Absolutely every human institution is utterly failing to do anything but protect itself, its power, and its profits.

It’s too much, and there’s no resolution to any of it in sight.

I feel so hopeless, and so helpless.

I’ve posted quite a bit in recent months about my mental-health struggles. Because that’s way cheaper than therapy, which I, as a starving writing, cannot afford. So here I am again with more of that. Feel free to skip reading this if you like. I won’t be offended. Honestly, I’m tired of my own whining and I wouldn’t blame you for being tired of it, either.

But also I want to let all of you — my lovely readers without whom I would not have kept this up for so many *checks notes* freakin’ decades now — know that I also am always stressing out about making sure that I am keeping you all satisfied. Being absent for my readers for so long makes me very anxious.

Anyway, this is the problem I’m having lately: I feel like I’m ready to get back to work, eager to do so, even, and I start each day enthused and revved up. But very quickly I crash into a sense that crawling back into my nice comfy bed in my little room and spending the day under the blankets would be the much better option.

To be clear, I haven’t actually, physically done that. Mentally, though, this is where I am.

It’s just been so damn impossible to get myself back into a good headspace. I keep trying, but I am… unmoored. It took me a long time to find that word to describe how I’m feeling. This past year has been an infernal one for me — the worst year of my life (so far) — and it has cast me adrift in a new world both personal and at large that I do not like, that I am not prepared for, and yet which I am stuck with.

I don’t feel like I ever had anything like a quarter-life crisis, but maybe this is my midlife crisis? If I can consider myself advantaged enough for such a luxury. If I can consider that I might make it another five decades beyond now.

I had had a strong feeling that last week the week before last would help me put a period on this past year, and on this feeling of being unmoored. It was July 11th, 2022, when I tested positive for Covid for the first and so far *knock on wood* only time. Though I was nowhere close to being hospitalized, perhaps because I had had three vaccine shots by that point, it was the sickest I’ve ever been in my entire life, for weeks. I know that I have been both lucky and privileged to have avoided any really major illnesses prior to this, and even to have swerved Covid for so long. It didn’t make my Covid experience any less awful. And it was AWFUL.

I’d just barely recovered from Covid when my mother’s health crisis hit. She ended up bouncing back and forth from hospitals to nursing homes for more than a month, and then she died. That might seem like a brief illness but it was, in fact, a very long illness that none of us knew about because she had ignored it. Because she had a fuckton of mental-health issues of her own that she refused to acknowledge, issues that included her not trusting doctors to a pathological extreme. I’d tried for years to get her to confront those issues and learn how to cope with them. She absolutely would not accept any help, and in fact actively denied she needed any help. (There are good reasons not to trust the medical establishment, especially for women, whose realities have been denied and ignored for too long, and whose pain is downplayed. But there’s a balance to be found, and my mother was unable to do that.)

My god, there’s so much work to do when someone dies. So much admin. Which sucks and is heartbreaking: I lost track of the number of times I had to tell some random customer-service rep on the phone that I was closing the account or making a claim because my mother had died, and then had to thank them for their scripted condolences. But all that crap, it turns out, is just the initial distraction that keeps you moving so you can deal with the practical stuff before the crushing grief hits.

Losing your mother absolutely flattens you, no matter how old you are — I’ll be 54 next month — and no matter how complicated your relationship with your mother may have been. Because now I’m also finally coming to understand and deal with the reality of how her issues impact(ed) me, not just when I was a kid but still to this day. Some of that involves new awarenesses of why I am the way I am and where my own bullshit has come from — I recently discovered the term parentificiation, and let’s just say: whoa, it explains a lot — and some of it is very much about being concrete about admitting that I can see hints of my mother’s worst, most self-destructive tendencies in myself and trying to avoid the bad outcomes that brought her down.

And, of course, now I cannot even talk to her about any of this. I can’t get any resolution on that front.

One aspect of my own personal bullshit is that I have always been inclined to do everything myself and keep my troubles buried deep within. This is not something I made conscious decisions about — it was instinct, though I see now how it was fostered in me. Because of… Reasons that I have recently pinpointed, it has always been difficult for me to acknowledge to others that I’m not coping at all the fuck well, and it has always been difficult for me to ask for help when I need it. I’m trying to be better about this! But it’s still really hard. I know that my feline dedication to hiding myself away and curling up in quiet, solitary despair when I’m hurting, either physically or mentally, has frustrated the people who love me, and also it’s not good for me either.

I used to think I am this way because I’m an introvert. Which I definitely am, and that’s definitely a part of it. But other newly dawned self-awareness has offered enlightening explication.

This is part of why I’m putting all this Out There. Not only for — hopefully — my own good, but also perhaps others who see themselves in this might begin to learn how to reach out and be less alone.

I’m so far from being done, because this past year has been some bullshit.

When I returned to London from New York, after my mother’s death and the admin and the getting my dad settled into his new life, the hip issue I’d been dealing with since early in the pandemic — oh, is this a hip-flexor strain? is this high-hamstring tendinopathy? — was finally diagnosed as end-stage osteoarthritis. Which set me on a path to having total hip-replacement surgery. Which finally happened eight nine weeks ago. My recovery is going well, but there’s still a ways to go, and it’s also now clear to me that I’m also going to need a knee replacement at some point in the near future. This is the knee on the other side from the hip, which has been giving me trouble for a while but got much worse in the months before the surgery when I had to rely on it — literally lean more on it — as the hip deteriorated. So my health problems are far from over.

In the midst of my ongoing recovery, I also passed the milestone of not having had anything like a menstrual period for a year, so I guess that means I’m officially menopausal. I never wanted to have children (and never did), so I’m okay with that possibility now being behind me. But this is another social and biological marker that I’m now beyond. I don’t even mind being considered, by some, technically old — I am so gonna lean into badass cronehood. But that doesn’t change how older women in our culture are seen, as even more disposable and dismissable than younger women. It occurred to me, after my six-week postsurgical checkup with my NHS surgeon, that the reason why I found myself trying to be clever and funny with him — a handsome, charming man not that much younger than me — was not that I was trying to flirt but because I simply wanted him to see me as a person, and not just as the latest random old lady to show up on his surgical roster.

So I’ve been pretty self-involved this past year. Not unaware of what’s been going on in the wider world, but more preoccupied with myself than usual. Now that I’m starting to feel able to stick my head above the parapet again… Whew, what a fucking disaster the world is becoming. An even worse disaster than it has been.

I don’t seem to have had any aftereffects of my Covid infection… so far (*knock on wood* again). But I do not take this for granted. The news media has decided to pretend that Covid is no big deal and the pandemic is over, but neither of those things is true. There’s plenty of information from reliable, reputable sources available — if you seek it out — about how incredibly terrifying the SARS-CoV-2 virus is. It’s not “just a cold”: it’s an immune-system-depleting virus that isn’t respiratory but vascular — meaning it gets in your blood — that can damage any part of your body your blood gets to… which is, of course, all of it, including your brain, heart, liver, lungs, kidneys — everything. This is true even if your initial infection seemed mild, or even if you were asymptomatic. (Did you know that most people who catch polio — you know, the disease that put some people into iron lungs — experienced no initial symptoms? That HIV infection starts with mild flulike symptoms? I did not know these things! Why aren’t we talking about these facts?) The odds of debilitating Long Covid or flat-out catastrophic damage from Covid — strokes, heart attacks, just fucking dropping dead — increase with each reinfection.

And so, in the hopes of dodging longterm disability and sudden death, I am doing everything I can to avoid catching Covid again. Because the bastard virus has not gone away and continues to kill hundreds and disable thousands every week in the UK alone.

Yet now, in Pandemic Year Four, I am often the only person masked up in public places.

This is one of the things that makes me feel unmoored. Like a visitor to planet Earth who sees a big picture everyone else is studiously ignoring. I’ve kind of always felt a little bit this way, as a weird geeky introvert who stands to the side and observes, but that feeling has really walloped me in recent months. I don’t particularly enjoy feeling like an outside spectator, cuz I’m not an alien visitor, I promise, but I am both baffled and terrified to see so many other people acting like everything is “normal.” I know that I’m doing the right thing, and I’m actually having a kind of apocalyptic fun upping my game by buying awesome masks — OMG, South Korea remains unbeaten in this regard. But I’m also angry because I know so many of the people walking around obliviously exposing themselves to this virus are acting like everything has reverted to carefree 2019 mode because corporate media has simply stopped talking about the pandemic — which, I repeat, is ongoing.

The manufacturing of consent in our culture has never been more apparent to me.

Roping in another thread of the polycrisis: The day last year when my week-long Covid fever finally broke was — fun! — also the same day that the UK hit a record-breaking 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit). I went from feeling like my body was on fire to feeling like the world was on fire, and lemme tell ya, the on-the-nose metaphoric bullshit of this might be enough to convince me, if I were conspiracy-theory-minded, that we are indeed living in a simulation and that the asshole playing the sim is fucking with us.

In some places on the planet, 40C/104F may not be so awful a summer extreme. In a country where the houses were build to retain heat (the house I live in was built in the late Victorian era, in what has traditionally been considered a temperate marine climate) and where air conditioning is at best limited and tepid, that kind of heat is horrible and inescapable. One of the reasons I moved from New York to London is for the weather… at least as it used to be. I hate NYC summers and winters and the comparatively mild London climate, in both summer and winter, was hugely appealing.

Now, though…

Only one year on, the global-warming shit has really started to hit the fan: out-of-control forest fires and flash flooding, record-low Arctic and Antarctic sea ice, terrifying and unrelenting heat domes. And not many people seem to care, or even notice… and too many others just flat-out dismiss it all as some sort of bizarre hoax. Which also makes me feel unmoored. We’ve known for decades that we need to stop burning fossil fuels, and we have just ignored the warnings. And this summer seems to be telling us that we’re out of time.

Here’s the thing: If the scientists are wrong about Covid and I’m being overly cautious by wearing my masks everywhere, I’ve lost nothing. Sure, masks are a little uncomfortable… but so are shoes. So are bras. And I wear those when I leave the house. Wearing a mask is an incredibly small, easy thing to do to potentially protect my health, with no real downside. I don’t see how this is a big deal, or why everyone isn’t doing the same.

Here’s the thing: If the scientists are wrong about carbon emissions heating up the planet to a dangerous degree, and we wean ourselves from enormously polluting fossil fuels and create a greener, cleaner world, what have we lost? (Corporate profits, maybe. But surely there are corporate profits to be found in solar, in wind, in all the other new industries we will create? I mean, if we must stick with capitalism…)

But, of course, there is little doubt that the scientists are right about Covid, and little doubt that the scientists are right about global warming. I just do not understand how so many damn people are happy to accept the scientific reality that allows for the existence of mobile phones and laptops and the Internet while also happily using those science-created toys to post science-denying nonsense. Or just studiously ignoring the world literally on fire around us.

Un-fucking-moored.

The world has felt to me like it’s falling apart since at least Trump and Brexit — so, around 2016 — but when I was finally able to step back from my year of hell and take a deep breath, all I saw was the collapse accelerating. My fields of journalism and movies are deep in crisis (this is a topic for an essay on its own, which is coming next). I’m even mourning the loss of Twitter, which has been an online community that has nurtured my spirit and allowed me to learn so much from people I would never have met offline, and watching it get trashed by a spoiled brat smashing his toys is genuinely breaking my heart.

At my lowest moments nowadays, I wonder: What is the point of doing anything when I am utterly at the mercy of institutions and cultural currents that are so far beyond whatever tiny efforts I can exert to counter them?

I hate myself for thinking this, but I think it nevertheless.

The bits of hope I can snatch come from the knowledge that our society has faced enormous challenges before, and that bad situations of enormous complexity have seemed hopeless before — like in the runup to World War II — and then we finally rallied and came together in collective purpose to do the things that needed to be done.

Perhaps the best we can hope for it that this will happen again. The big questions are: How much will we lose before we get to that moment? And how much more will we lose in the process of fixing it all?

Still, when I look up from my own personal misery right now, I feel paralyzed by powerlessness. I’m mourning my youth and the more pleasant world I grew up in. Not just the more pleasant climate of my early years, but a more pleasant world economically and politically (at least from the perspective of a white Westerner like me): by those standards, the best years of my life were in the 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War but before 9/11, when everything started going to shit again. (Perhaps any relative bucolicness is hard for youngsters to understand today, but that brief era is what prompted historian Francis Fukuyama to declare that we’d reached the supposed “end of history.”) My best years financially were in the 90s… when I was only in my 20s.

None of this is how life was “supposed” to be. It certainly was not what the unspoken expectations of the America I grew up in promised was in store for me. Again, I understand that this was always an extraordinarily privileged place to come from, in all ways. And that it is the privileges stolen in America’s global imperialism that are in huge part responsible for much of the enormous mess we’re facing right now. If we manage to come together as a civilization, as a species, to clean up the mess, that is going to require righting those past wrongs. I hope we can figure out how to do all of this. I think we will. But I don’t think I will live long enough to see it. I think I will have ended up living most of my life amidst escalating crises.

So I am unmoored. Adrift on rough seas with little hope of seeing calm shores again.

But I can pick up my oar and start rowing again. I can’t let this paralysis stop me. I’m a writer. I have a lot to say. And I’ve barely said anything at all, even though I’ve been at this for decades.

Time to get back to work.

UPDATE 09.03.23: Oh, wait. My year of hell continues…