"The Invention of Memory"

[onlyknownothing]

My father has COVID. Again. My friend in Texas has caught it for the first time. I had to test myself today, because I interacted with my father last weekend before he started showing symptoms and I'm not at 100% right now physically. (Negative, thank goodness.)

All of this is to say, I resonated deeply with this essay by Emily Dupree shared by Shel in her community wrapup this week.

"It wasn’t until about two years into the pandemic, when the “vax and relax” era was clearly not going to work, that I had to reckon with my system for organizing time. I couldn’t delay the future any longer; I couldn’t continue protecting the story of my life from the pandemic’s incursion. So I accepted the terrible fact that the pandemic was going to continue indefinitely and was not merely an event in my life but rather the container in which the rest of my life would take place. This was a difficult reckoning. It required that I come to terms with a great deal of grief about the failures of those around me; about what I lost and will have lost; a privilege in thinking that these were the sorts of world-historical changes that happened to other people, at other times. But it was also a reckoning that rescued the orderliness of time, for me. It was as if the clock was un-paused, and life resumed its forward march.

I think most people stabilized their warped sense of time by other means. Instead of accepting that the pandemic continued on, that we failed to contain it and so would need to incorporate its ongoing reality into the stories we tell ourselves about our own lives, they instead transformed the fantasy of after into their reality. After the pandemic, after the lockdowns, after our world ruptured. They were able to interrupt the prolonged uncertainty that the pandemic had brought to all of our lives by erecting a finish line just in time for them to run through it. And as they ran through it, celebrating the fictional end of an arduous journey, they simultaneously invented a new before. This is the invention of memory."

I've never stopped wearing a mask. It marks me as "different" where I live. I have legitimately overheard someone being forcibly-stopped by their wife from coming to confront me over it. I spend mental energy regularly just trying to come up with reasons why I'm wearing it that I can give people that they'll believe, because there's a significant percentage where I live who somehow have come to believe that COVID was a Democratic conspiracy to induce vaccination with "the mark of the beast."

I am not kidding. I wish I were. My current excuse is "I have walking pneumonia," because most people still think that is a real illness. Some people are unfortunately full-on devolving back to medieval "evil spirits and imbalanced humours" theory, led by the nose via an eager cadre of so-called "wellness" influencers with courses and products to sell.

I am not significantly immune-compromised; I am prediabetic and overweight, which will meaningfully worsen my outcome if I ever do get COVID, but that's only part of why I still mask up when going out. Another part of it is, admittedly, purely personal convenience; I am autistic, and a part of how that expresses in me is that I do not have a particularly expressive facial response. I used to consciously "put on" expressions to ease the discomfort it causes other people - "masking" in the autistic sense versus the literal one. Part of the dozens of what I refer to as "active processes" I use to try and interact with neurotypical people on a day-to-day basis without being seen as rude or inconsiderate or even (as I have been assigned by some jerks) "sociopathic." It all takes conscious thought, it all is something I have to think about even if I've gotten habituated to performing in this way, and so when I was given the chance to slap a mask over half my face and stop having to internally go "they're smiling, smile back so they know you are happy they are happy"? I leapt at it.

That's honestly a fringe benefit compared to the real major reason, though - which is that I feel absolutely horrible for all the people with active immune-compromising conditions for whom there is no "after the pandemic." Because it's never ended, our society just collectively decided that people who will die from COVID should. And so everyone who might, or likely would, is forced into the position of voluntary exile or risking their lives every damn day.

I have lost two family members to COVID. One had Down syndrome, one was elderly, both were in nursing care. They didn't have to die. They died because it was decided, collectively, that the "right" of their caretakers to not wear masks and take precautions was more important than the right to life of those who they cared for. That it was a justifiable sacrifice. They weren't really contributing anything, anyways - right?

My father has bought into this mentality in full. He doesn't mask, he goes to group gatherings regularly, he argues that because he still goes to the gym every week and "lives healthy" that he'll be fine. The people who've died must have done or been something that brought that upon them, right? Full-on just world fallacy. He is 80 years old. I'm very worried he won't make it through one of these times - every additional infection with COVID worsens your chances of surviving the course of the disease, or at least making it out without disabling long-term symptoms. But he is a retired physician, and that means he thinks he knows better.

Never mind that he never practiced in this field.

I wear a mask because I want to model prosocial behavior. I wear a mask because I think everyone still should. Because people don't have to keep getting sick, keep dying, for preventable reasons. Because I want people with disabilities and health issues to be able to live without constantly having to balance their mental health against their physical health in every single interaction. Because I believe experiencing this existence is a precious and limited commodity for everyone, and we could all make it more accessible for everyone if we just cared to try.

COVID precautions are a rights issue, yes. A disability rights issue. Because telling the general public that they don't have to care about the spread of disease is, in the same breath, telling impacted individuals that they must either live in voluntary exile or die. And like it or not, we're all going to be "impacted individuals" at some point. Repeated COVID infections compound to disabling conditions. Age compromises immune systems, as much as my father wants to deny it - the studies are there.

The current mentality is, quite honestly, a fatalistic and nihilistic one papered over by false bravado. It is an admission that we don't care to live in a world where we have to concern ourselves with the wellbeing of ourselves and others. That we'd rather increase suffering and death than face the suffering and death which currently exists and go a bit out of our way in efforts to reduce it. Playing Russian Roulette every day rather than accept the slight discomforts and necessary adaptations required to avoid it.

How very fundamentally American. "Live free or die" seems like such a powerful motto... until you're the one dying.

EDIT FOR ADDENDUM - Of course today would be the day that I learn that the imagined "Right to Comfort" is one of the pillars of white supremacy culture. Well, it sure applies in the here and now.

Comments

[wantedonvoyage]

While I am not currently wearing a mask everyday I would never hassle anybody for doing so. If there were a situation where someone said "I can't do that/be there unless everybody is masked" I would do it without hesitation. I wish my employer would tell people who are ill to either mask or stay home, but--as you said--the world has collectively decided it is done with COVID, even though COVID is not done with us.

This was a trauma event of generational proportion and I get that everybody's response to it is different. We have a woman from church who doesn't leave her house now except to go to her son's house and watch her granddaughter during the day. She complains about being "exiled" but hasn't articulated this is what it is about. When the granddaughter was a baby, she said it was because the baby hadn't had a vaccination and she didn't want to put her at risk. But that was two years ago and she's still doing it. Meanwhile the parents take the kid all over the place and none of them wear masks. She's not IC as far as I know but the concern is real for her; while her isolation makes me sad I would never criticize her for it.

[locust_breakfast]

hello from a fellow person in a region where masking gets you gawked at! I like your "walking pneuomonia" excuse; what I usually tell people (because I'm lucky that those who ask are usually good-faith concerned folks I actually work or socialize with) is "I'm at elevated risk of developing long COVID and having more severe long COVID symptoms". which is true, if not the whole truth. and I think it balances doing some education with not directly confronting someone's beliefs, which I'm not generally trying to do on a random tuesday. but I have seen my behavior modeling rub off positively on friends in little ways, and that's about as much as I can hope for as an individual. I'm so sorry for your losses, and I'm extending solidarity for living in cognitive dissonance with your loved ones on this.

[onlyknownothing]

Thank you. 😔