Not that anybody asked, but I officially declare 2020 the year of “naw, it’s actually not all going to be okay.”
Oh, and comforting Zoom crews that you never in a million years would have expected yourself to depend so deeply on.
The first part is obvious. Even those of us that are usually cushioned from precarity by wealth, whiteness, or whatever have had our asses handed to us this year--all of our best laid plans incinerated and all of our usual coping mechanisms proven powerless. It’s been humbling. It’s been sobering. It’s been terrible.
But it’s also been enlightening.
We finally understand how broken we are. And how worth healing.
We are aware that the worst thing you can imagine, can actually happen.
We have been schooled in the profundity of our own lack of control.
The second part has been, from what I can tell, this mostly invisible, overwhelmingly beautiful way of weathering the year. We have found ourselves on Zoom calls with small groups of equally terrified or enraged or grieving humans--some of them were our closest friends in the before times, some of them we didn’t even know that well--and we have clung to one another like a digital life raft floating in the perilous waves of a dark, lonely ocean.
In most cases, the sacred comfort of this snuck up on us. We thought we were just doing a one-time thing or a reunion Zoom because--crazy times, why not?--and then someone said, “Should we keep meeting?”
And now, nearly a year later, we have held one another through death and disillusion and depression.
Some of us have a few of these groups. I’ve got the teachers from my kids’ school. We were friendly before, but now we’re kin. When covid hit, I asked them what the parents could do to support them in light of their heroism--delivering food and technology, relearning how to do their jobs in 2-D--and they said, “Would you do that thing where you read a poem or ask a question and then we write and talk about it?”
I said sure, and then we just kept doing that. Every single week, for so many anchoring weeks now. We don’t really have a name for what we’re doing. We just keep showing up and saying “How are you?” in 52 different ways, and then really listening to the answer.
I’ve got another--three women that I guess are best described as the ones that I am most likely to be found in a body of water with. Alongside the Russian River, nursing our babies. At midnight at Esalen, telling off a misogynist in the hot tubs. In the Korean spa, watching our skin flake away and flow down a drain. (What I wouldn’t give for a solid sloughing off right now...) Our monthly or so Zoom calls have become our hot water moments, when we sink into our real feelings, talk about the shit we haven’t even had time to realize is actually pretty terrible, empathize and problem solve, but also just laugh and laugh and cry and laugh.
I know my mom has been doing weekly Zooms with her crew of women who have been together for decades. Others have gathered with college roommates or high school besties they lost along the way. Even my 7-year-old daughter, who is so over distance learning, will sometimes Facetime with her friends; I find the most delightful collage of screenshots of their sweet faces afterward--like some avant garde art project on the emotional life of children during the weirdest year on Planet Earth yet.
And I’m struck by the beauty of this. Have we relearned something about holding one another? About the small and sacred? Have we remembered that when all the choices and the work trips and the self-importance are stripped away, we are really just people who want other people to see and know and love on us? To acknowledge how hard it is to be a person at all, much less one during a mismanaged global pandemic?
It’s almost physically impossible for me to acknowledge that I might, in fact, miss the Zoom crews when all of this is over. I so long to be in person with these people I love. To sense the weight of their bodies moving while they laugh. To smell their shampoo when I hug them. To be free from this damn laptop.
But I don’t want to be free from the knowing that, even in the worst year, I am held in the best, most surprising ways. Our social mettle has been tested this year. So hard. And we have proven ourselves worthy of one another, close even in distance, listening even in silence. We have logged in and shown up. And by this I am touched and transformed.
While I am not a Zoom person and have just about lost touch with everyone I used to connect with, I am aware that the few who share their lives with me through text and telephone have helped me feel less isolated when the alone-ness is almost too much. I do wonder what it will be like to be in daily touch with people in Tai Chi classes and over lunch in restaurants, or dinners in each other's homes. Right now, that feels overwhelming. Like someone who has recently gained sight or hearing, it may be overwhelming. I look forward to figuring that out whenever that time arrives. Meanwhile, your writings bring me a welcome and remarkable connection I never expected. A stranger, half my age, sharing emotional experiences that make me wonder how you know so much about me?! Your words are some of the most healing in my world right now. Thank you.