The year of no distractions
At various points over the last nine months, I’ve felt an acute need to pull out and read all my old journals, which stretch back to when I was about 12. I haven’t done it yet, because many of them are in a closet I’m not looking forward to rummaging around in. (Yes, that is a metaphor, and also a fact.) The urge itself is interesting to me though, because I’ve never had it before. My journals are for writing, not for reading. I’ve never wanted to see my past mistakes and delusions in the harsh light of an adult perspective, or revisit the steps that got me from there to here. But it’s also a project I never even thought to tackle, because there was always something better to do than read thousands of pages of my own thoughts. Or at least there was always something else to do.
In 2020, all our distractions, illusions, and performances were swept away by the undeniable, unavoidable, unfathomably profound truth of a plague. For me, that truth has manifested in an intense interest in both the most micro and macro scales of my life. I can talk for hours, in minute detail, about my own habits and routines and feelings, or I can be dissecting the societal structures I exist within and how for so long they tricked so many of us into thinking they weren’t built on a foundation of cruelty and unfairness. I have almost no interest in or patience for anything in between these two extreme levels of inquiry, i.e. all the bullshit that used to be called normal life.
From the structural perspective, I can see more clearly than ever how the whole world is designed, nefariously and unjustly, so that someone like me can be safe and successful in it. (As Helena Fitzgerald recently put it in her newsletter Griefbacon, those of us economically able to quarantine think that our plague year stories are about what happened inside our “small rooms,” but “most of the story is about whether we get to go inside at all.”) I can see the pile of previously invisible poker chips that have been stacked in front of me without me doing anything to deserve them. I can also see the grotesque things I’ve done, the indefensible decisions I’ve made and keep making, to guarantee that more and more chips keep getting added to the pile. And whenever I think I’ve seen them all, more are revealed.
At the same time, on the personal level, I can see how much, and how little, all those unearned poker chips have to do with anything approaching fulfillment and satisfaction. Yes, it’s easier to ask questions about such lofty wants when all your energy isn’t taken up with needs like making sure you have enough food or a stable income. Of course. But, crucially, having all the poker chips in the world is not the same thing as being fulfilled, and it never will be. Even if you are one of those very lucky people without a single structural obstacle standing in the way of the life you want, you still have to do the work of being the person who can live that life. You still have to show up every day seeking fulfillment, which can be the opposite of comfort, especially if your pile of chips makes reaching for comfort easy. You still have to figure out what showing up and fulfillment mean.
With so little external inputs into my life in 2020, what became glaringly, painfully obvious was how much I was standing in my own way, especially when it came to the creative work I wanted to be making, that I knew I needed to feel fulfilled. I sought out ways to waste my own time. I leapt at any chance for someone else to tell me what I should do, and how I should be. I used structural explanations to excuse my self-destructive behavior. I craved everyone’s approval but my own. I was distracted and numb, running in place, and as long as I kept it that way, I wouldn’t even notice. I haven’t fully fixed these things; all the impulses are certainly still there. But you can’t change anything you can’t see. In 2020, I could see.
In the early days of the pandemic, as the music stopped and those of us with sufficiently large piles of chips scrambled to claim a chair, Pope Francis said something I’ve thought about ever since: “We carried on regardless, thinking we would stay healthy in a world that was sick.” Like in the oldest of stories, the idols we worshipped—ambition, capital, forward motion, easy and unthinking consumption, a certain kind of 21st-century rootlessness masquerading as independence—were revealed to be demons. We nurtured them, and they destroyed us.
2020 showed us how foundational those demons are to our society, yes, but also how deeply they’ve burrowed into our souls. How they’ve shaped who we thought we were and who we wanted to be. How they kept us numb to their evils, out in the world and inside ourselves. The word apocalypse comes from ancient Greek, where it means the uncovering, the revelation. There’s no other word for 2020. It was a revelation.
Programming note
This is the last newsletter of the year. I’ll be taking a holiday break and returning to your inboxes on January 17.