Life, Interrupted: On The Year That Has Been But Hasn’t Gone

Feb 1 | Mairi Redman

In early November, for the first time in eight months, I returned to the office where I work. It was deserted, unexpectedly eerie. Smackingly devoid of its usual animated hum. I remember glancing at the array of forlorn potted plants, sitting unmoved in their usual spots, half withered and soldiering on or disintegrating into earthy ash. Time had passed, of course, and plenty of it, yet this was the only indication. Everything else was in suspension. I found myself wistfully wondering if perhaps they could be revived to their former vigor or were now stuck in their ways, immutable. At certain points during the last year I have wondered the same about myself.

Now approaching twelve months in, the long-term effects of such a year on each of our psyches are yet to fully unfurl. Still, I wonder just what impact this whole event will have had on us all. We've never before experienced such an immediate and global threat, something managing to yank the whole world grudgingly to a halt. Covid is simply everywhere, and it's deadly. There’s no denying that the current situation across UK hospitals is absolutely dire. But I also fear the curdling rise in collective malaise, the erosive fear which threatens to strip us from our bones.

The threat of Covid is ever present and miserably vile, ominous in its invisibility yet despicably lethal. It is both undeniably real and seemingly intangible, an apparent contradiction that conspiracists have warped to the extreme. What would previously be deemed paranoia is now prudence, whereas living in cheerful continuance of our daily lives is narrow-minded idiocy. Our whole way of living has been turned around slap bang on its head and it’s disorienting as hell. I find myself sympathising - whilst ardently disagreeing - with those who refuse to fully accept this reality, perhaps a sentiment I’m only privy to having not yet lost anyone to this disease.

What would previously be deemed paranoia is now prudence, whereas living in cheerful continuance of our daily lives is narrow-minded idiocy.

Undoubtedly, it is only the most fortunate of us who have experienced little more suffering than the rabid gnaw of boredom, an emphatic truth that must not be understated. Privilege seems to me to be the other silent and omnipresent truth across this pandemic, an acknowledgment that makes my words feel hollow. Yet this persistent feeling that we lack our normal grounding in reality is widespread, and sourly palpable. We now occupy this perpetual, claustrophobic backstage; a life bereft of almost all its usual pleasures and events. 

In the aptly titled essay The Year of Blur, writer Alex Williams reflects that “a year so momentous also feels, in a way, as if nothing happened at all.” Without our usual routines and separations, our brains have quite simply lost their grip on time. He writes that the usual breaks which separate our memories have been lost, a gloomy explanation for why we feel so psychologically unmoored. Another key conceptual anchor, our perception of space, is also at considerable risk of distortion. With the bulk of our activities occurring solely in the virtual sphere, we are left only flimsily tethered by our physical senses, bolstering the feeling of being adrift.

Accordingly, the very reality of our daily lives has been altered, to an extent that would have seemed unthinkable only this time last year. We are exposed to the strange phenomenon of simultaneously sharing such a colossal global experience and spending so much more time alone. In his book Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harari suggests that “what we call sensations and emotions are in fact algorithms”, wherein our unconscious interactions with various external elements result in feelings - the conclusion of instinctive, covert calculations. During the pandemic, we are forced to reconstruct the patterns of our lives on a macroscopic level, whilst exposed to fewer micro-adjustments from the outside world. Our cerebral diet has been sparse of novelty yet sated with stress, none of which is conducive to a healthy life. Is it really surprising that it’s leading our brains to revolt?

Throughout all this, there is the additional issue of there being very little narrative for us to chew on; a marked loss of idiosyncrasies that give life its flavour. Our shared existence may have peeled off into idle slices, but by making the wider experience more uniform it is also somewhat flattened. Whilst talking with a friend, I remember despairing, semi-jokingly, that I hadn’t done anything sufficiently embarrassing in a while; a desperate clutch for even the most trivial of novel anecdotes. Months having passed with scant news to recall, I've been leaning ever increasingly on the intimacy of relationships in order to facilitate a sense of meaning, despite the monotony of isolation. There is no longer any careful seeding of emotional data, scattered amidst the flutter of busy lives:  I am harvesting in ignorance of the seasons.

There is no longer any careful seeding of emotional data, scattered amidst the flutter of busy lives:  I am harvesting in ignorance of the seasons.

I’ve found, age twenty-three, that the young are told we’re malleable, supple, like callow clay held snug in the hands of our youth. There’s no need to worry, time is on your side, experiences are yet to form you as they will. I’ve always struggled to accept this sentiment, feeling overwhelmed by a world I continuously fall short of understanding. Since the arrival of Covid, a certain intensity is now constantly beetling at the back of my brain, nagging that my youth has been squandered to the thralls of somber stagnancy. But in pandemic times, youth is part of what keeps us safe. Hopefully it'll allow us to adapt.

But we’ll see. The vaccines are on their way.

Recommended by Mairi:

• As referenced above, the illuminating The Year of Blur by Alex Williams, unpacking the effects of the pandemic on our sense of time.

• Somewhat of an ode to doomscrolling, this small poem I wrote sometime last year:

  The pursuit of calm is frantic

  Clasping peace with clammy hands

  Smothered in static or prickled by gloom

  A horror show unmanned

• This essay written by Haley Nahman (or any of her other Maybe Baby newsletters, really), reflecting on the value of recklessness:

  “It follows that lockdown has many of us yearning for the spoils of recklessness. We’ve never been so careful, so fearful, so aware of the end and yet largely unable to meaningfully harness that awareness.”

• Nathan J. Robinson’s soberingly succinct reminder of the normalisation of corporate injustice, our moral responsibility to frame stories accurately and the frequent sentimentalisation of what are actually structural failures.

• And finally, this article by Pandora Sykes on the dynamics of pandemic friendships and the unexpected challenges that social distancing presents:

  “Friendship is also reciprocal, but it works best in tandem, when one is a little more up (to do the pepping) and the other a little more down (to be pepped). So what happens when everybody is frazzled, everybody is weary, and everybody is frightened?”