February 6, 2022

What I’ve learned writing about apocalypses, during an apocalypse

I haven’t yet written much about my book here, aside from what I’m discovering about my own habits and patterns in the process of writing it. That’s partly because I’m still at the point where everything I have to say about my book needs to go in the book, partly because I don’t want to “give away” (whatever that means) too many of my ideas and arguments so far before publication, and partly because I need breaks from engaging with such a big and difficult project.

I feel like I’m experiencing this moment in time much differently that other people, however, and a lot of that has to do with how, for the past two years, I’ve been seeing everything through the lens of my book. For those who don’t remember, my book is about apocalypses. I started working on the proposal in 2018, and it sold at the end of the summer of 2020. It was either perfect timing, or the worst timing imaginable. For most of the time I was writing the proposal, I thought the book would be born into a world where we could see the next apocalypse coming but were also, in important ways, still waiting for it. Instead, I ended up creating it during exactly the kind of event I’m researching1, and it will be published in (presumably) the aftermath, the time when we’re starting to look back on the pandemic and trying to figure out what it meant with at least a bit more distance than we have now. I don’t yet know how the pandemic itself will appear in the book, though I have some ideas. I do know that experiencing it changed what the book was going to be, and writing the book changed how I’ve experienced the pandemic.

One of the main arguments of my book is that apocalypses are not endings, but transformations. They are chances for new beginnings—the best chances we and our societies ever get. Hidden truths are revealed, and new truths are created. This process can and often does involve a tremendous amount of suffering. “May you live in interesting times” and all that. We all know what that feels like. But apocalypses are also full of opportunity. Nothing is stagnant, nothing is predictable, nothing can be taken for granted. Where we end up on the other side isn’t guaranteed to be better than where we were before. All it’s guaranteed to be is different. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be better, if we decide to work together to make it so.

I’ve spent the last two years developing an apocalyptic imagination. Not in the doom-and-gloom way, or even the burn-it-down way. More like the let-it-go way, radical-acceptance way. The less tightly we can hang onto the past, the more clearly we can see the different possible futures in front of us, and the more deliberately we can build the one we want. It doesn’t matter where we thought we were going, or who we thought we were, before all this happened. That world is gone, and it’s not coming back. Writing my book has helped me accept that, and even see that it’s not such a bad thing.

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We’re at yet another threshold now. For the first time, the after might actually be in sight. We might still be far away from it (sorry), but we’ve rounded a corner that makes it visible. A new status quo, whatever it is, is beginning to emerge. That’s exciting. It’s also dangerous. Now more than ever, we’re susceptible to the siren song of “back to normal.”

I know it sounds good. I know we all wish none of this had ever happened, that we could wake up tomorrow un-traumatized and unworried, free of all the terrible things we had to learn, all the things we now know are possible. I wish that, too. But it did happen. So wherever we’re headed next, it’s not “back to normal.” It’s not “back” anywhere. It’s forward. It’s new. It’s unknown. It’s scary.

The hierarchies and the power structures and the unquestioned norms of the old world—they don’t want to die. So they, and the people who benefited most from them, will play on your fear. They’ll take advantage of your exhaustion, your grief, your frustration. They’ll offer you the band-aid of “back to normal” and tell you it’s enough to treat the gaping wounds in our hearts and our societies. They’ll do everything they can to tamp down our apocalyptic imaginations, right when we need them most. Take it from me, apocalypse expert—“back to normal” is a lie. We can’t change what happened. All we can do is allow ourselves to be changed by it. To ask ourselves not how to get back to where we were, but where we want to go next.