by Becca Shaw Glaser April 19, 2022, The Free Press
On March 12, 2020, Nate and I had turned in a Notes from Lime City column called “What We Are Depressed/ Hopeful About This Week” where I namedropped Lizzo and kvetched about CMP, Wink’s Place being shut down, Biden’s boost in the primaries, and, in classic Nate Davis fashion, he gave shout-outs to “fecundity,” “viriditas,” and “the generally wondrous achievements of humanity.” But then, the whole world shifted. On March 15, I wrote our editor: “Wow, a lot can change in one day. I was checking on this week’s column and it looks like it was written a few light years ago … but I suppose it’s too late to change it.”
I mentioned a visit to the Rockland Shaw’s where cashiers told me of a fistfight over toilet paper at the dollar store. I described driving past one of those roughed-out, side-of-the-road spots on Route 1 in Thomaston where people sell blueberries in summer, but instead of blueberries, a woman held a sign: “Do you need T.P.?” while waving a roll of Scott toilet paper overhead. Our editor said that if I could get a new column to him first thing in the morning, I should go for it. So at 3 a.m., I turned in “Making It Through the Pandemic Together.” I wrote of a transformed universe: the first ever masked people I saw at a grocery store — a panicked young father with his toddler, barren shelves, eggs offered to the homeless shelter, an apparent rush to stockpile ammo, the daze and fragility in the air.
Two years later, and where are we? Relationships strained (though sometimes strengthened), health care workers frayed, 200,000 children in the U.S. have had a parent die of COVID, almost a million dead of COVID in the U.S. alone, substance overdose deaths escalating (over 500 in Maine in 2020, 636 in 2021), despair, anxiety, aggressive and distracted driving increasing, the political/economic system as diseased as ever, a local and international housing crisis. And don’t let me forget wars, mass shootings, the prison industrial complex, widespread rape, domestic violence, and melting polar ice caps.
Many of us are starting to timidly emerge from the wreckage, even though the pandemic really isn’t over. I went to Moody’s last week, spaghetti and meatballs, strawberry shortcake, my god, appeared before me. No one else was masked, and I felt too embarrassed to keep mine on until a masked group sat down at the table beside me. When asked, “Why?” by their unmasked friend who said he was “just done with it,” one replied, “There are still 1,000 people dying of COVID every day in the U.S. We aren’t ready to take them off.”
A month ago, my first college boyfriend died. I’ve been revisiting the letters, journals, photos and videos from those years. Years when art, poetry and music gushed from our mouths and exploded out everywhere, when the art itself — just the act of making it and throwing it up on a wall or a telephone pole — felt like a way to say **** you to all the ways the world wanted to destroy us. I’m thinking about time, about what life sometimes does to us, about the accumulation of losses, about what we can survive — and how, and about what we just can’t. I’m viewing Forrest’s death, and his beloved housemate’s last summer, in part, as casualties of this horrific pandemic.
I grieve. I grieve for Forrest. I grieve for a culture that doesn’t know what to do with grief, with despair, that pushes on, that provides so little — not even the most basic support structures to keep a life from being one second away from drowning in debt — having no health care, no paid parental leave, no child care, no shelter.
Culturally, we need endless healing and help, and a variety of coping mechanisms to choose from; we need to demand so much more than our current system has any intention of ever giving us. How do we heal — not just personally, but collectively, socio-politically? Because all the self-help in the world will not fix the fact that the system itself is abusive at its core.
Still, we need to talk self-care. One of the things I’ve been thinking about, and grieving, is that my decades of activism seem to have moved so little in a world that still relentlessly tries to place us in boxes, and sees our very lives and deaths as commodities. Turns out I don’t have much control, ultimately, over the larger structures. Which means that sometimes self-care and self-compassion might be the only things we have any real ability to accomplish, and, when the brutal parts of life start to catch up with us — losses, traumas — they may be life-saving. Coping techniques can look radically different for different people, and it could be that fighting for the most basic of human needs, such as shelter, is what self-care looks like at times. Lately, to try to make it out of the burned-out state I’ve been in, I’m trying to take a break from “fighting” injustices all the time (the constant internal dialogue I have with everything in the whole world) and to reconnect with people, look at the news (a little bit) less, meditate using the Plum Village app, take naps. After two pandemic years of basically not moving an inch, I’m blasting fierce, joyful songs and starting to walk/run more; I’m reading actual
paper books, and getting into tiny, magical things like snipping the green dripping stems of daffodils and placing them in a thin red vase. And there’s always the release from crying. Like, I opened the front door the other day and the fact that there was actual warmth coming from the air? I started to cry.
Please find what is healing to you and go towards it. Tattoos? Massage? Counseling? Journaling? Helping? Comedy? The ocean? Smashing stuff? One deep breath in, one deep breath out? I am rooting for us all.
Becca did in fact move an inch in the past two years — from Rockland to Thomaston to Rockport. She is coauthor/editor/illustrator of Mindful Occupation: Rising Up Without Burning Out, created while living in New York City and participating in the Occupy Wall Street protests.