I promised a reflection on the third covi-versary (pandennum?) at the end of my last missive, but found, upon reflection, little to say. As a chronically ill person, I have little interest in the privileged and individualized “being bored with my family for a few months in material comfort was absolutely dire/life-changing” narrative (“Imagine…being isolated from society with no recourse! Imagine…a lack of control over your own autonomy!”), but I also don’t know how many times I can repeat myself about the very real, quite ongoing, extremely troubling dynamic of our lasting covid denialism.
As happens when I pin myself down to a topic for this space too early, or to have cute timing with a world event (subconsciously chasing that social-media-paced dopamine hit of RELEVANCE, surely), I also lost two weeks to not writing about covid, or anything else, here. That got me thinking about “lost time,” a phrase I’ve heard enter mainstream discourse in reference to the time designated “the pandemic,” but previously associated with my sometimes cognitive and neurological symptoms.
I “lost” two weeks. Did I? Remembering times when I have, troublingly, lost entire days and near-weeks to my memory (while it may be chic and quirky online to claim “dissociation” these days, I can’t say it’s fun or desirable), I realize I lost nothing. Perhaps I’m due for a re-frame on casually inherited language. I gave two weeks to the following:
submitting a too-early draft of a prose piece about my inevitable covid infection last winter
hosting out-of-town friends, forging new connections and combinations of people, and getting kicked out of a favorite place by a Park Ranger
laying in bed feverish and migraine-d after a latest covid booster
During that last, less-voluntary “giving” of my time, I slackened my phone use guidelines and spent some time in the hell-scape of Instagram Reels. I have tried to keep Zuck from knowing me in a variety of ways, and for this reason (and maybe because their algorithm isn’t very effective?), they do not know what to show me. The biggest leak in my privacy is what my friends and I send to each other, so I get just enough dopamine to keep going from the similar “content” I’m fed. In between, though, it swings from trad-wives cooking, to satire about Christian homeschool moms, to real Christian homeschool moms, to nostalgia-core fashion flashbacks and makeup tutorials, to hot takes about Beyonce, to dating advice for femme lesbians (closer, but feels like an attack, Mark), to straight couples line dancing, and so on. All the above are peppered with (a term I’ll choose to believe I’m coining) “Take-Toks,” the iconic video form that goes, “Has anyone else noticed [insert mundane or vaguely conspiratorial “take” here]?”.
One of the emergent takes I was fed in this fashion, prone and pliable in my weakened state, was about time and time “loss”. “Wait, 2019 was FIVE years ago?”; “No way we’re nostalgic for 2016 already…Yeah, old person, that was EIGHT years ago!”; “Bring back 2020 makeup”; “Does anyone else feel like time is speeding up?”
The rapid cycling of nostalgia is another topic, well-worn, and that maybe I’ll deep dive on one day, but I was more interested in the way I was convinced into this reality framing of allegedly “lost” time. Wow, I thought, 2017 seems like it was yesterday! OMG, the year is going by me so quickly!
But then I stopped (probably my over-extended app timer kicked me out of the dopamine hole) and actually thought. I remembered that I had organically felt that time was speeding up, but that it was a function of entering my early-mid-twenties, the stage in which the bulk of “creators” I saw sharing these theories now develop. And the thing is, that’s not a new feeling, it’s just aging and grappling with the mind-bending realization that as you experience more days and years, each represents a smaller fraction of your total lived experience. I remember that it induced a panic of urgency. I appreciate now that I’m beginning, slowly, to recover from that urgency.
Then I started (with less articulation, for sure) thinking about this idea of “giving” versus “losing” time. When I think about the first years of the pandemic, I do have bitternesses that emerge, opportunities I “lost” because of change from outside. But I can also list off the things that I did, the relationships I made, the lessons I learned, and the changes I embraced during that time. It wasn’t lost at all. And, at the risk of sounding smug, I think a lot of that had to do with a concerted effort to heal my relationship with technology and specifically with social media and my phone.
What was I doing and feeling four years ago?
According to a now-archived Instagram post from March 18, 2020, I was:
“…feeling, maybe weirdly, hopeful in this moment. what an opportunity to clean out our entire dusty ass society. i don’t say that to disregard anyone’s/my own very real fears and anxieties, just to express how often i have wished for a pause button. maybe this is it. i hope you are getting what you need and i hope to help connect you if you are not. good things are in motion and we will always take care of each other.”
I was also, it must be said, looking very cute in the bathtub with bubbles and a mud mask on (and full eyeliner?), which could not have hurt the message.
But it still feels true and consistent, and it made me happy to look back and really reflect on what time has given to me, rather than taken away. I suppose, if anything, that you can consider this an invitation to reclaim your own experience of reality if you find yourself melding into the freaky mind-meld of the take factory. Maybe you aren’t “losing time,” maybe we are just not collectively “processing grief” or “connecting on a deeper level” or “going outside enough.”
Anyway, here is a roundup of what I’ve found most interesting, here and elsewhere, lately:
First, fittingly, on covid and brain-tricks for believing we’re all done with it":
A crucial, brief, and linked-up reminder to continue to engage meaningfully with the people of Gaza:
This piece on “discourse” (one of my own personal Hells) and the idea that, perhaps, no offense, but we do have personal agency in our lives.
This crucial read about the limitations of personal aesthetic as the be-all, end-all of an ever-expanding notion of trans politics. A must read for any queer person rendered socially desirable by their aesthetic in certain contexts while perhaps not being terribly politically impacted by that choice (oof, I know, come for me), but also for anyone interested in the materiality of politics in an age of ideology, performance, hyper-individualism and backlash.
Finally, I enjoyed friend-of-a-friend’s quiet musing on containment and introspection and exchange here a great deal. Particularly because I had also just seen The Zone of Interest in a crowded theater and highly recommend it to all of us living on this side of the fence.
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