March 14, 2021

losing a whole year

Manila, 14 March—I spent the past week in a fog, it seems. It was surreal. I’m not a person who easily forgets, and yet a handful of things felt like they fell right through the cracks of my brain—a coverage, a deadline, a Friday night phone call with girlfriends. I admit I’m a bit disappointed with myself—Type A Capricorns, we’re an organized lot, we prep for meetings at least half an hour ahead. How the hell did I miss that coverage? How did I forget that I had that thing due today? How had that phone call slipped from my mind?

How did I forget all of that?

Late-stage pandemic is messing with your brain

Actually, the other week, I read an article about this on The Atlantic, which discusses the effect of ‘late-stage pandemic’ on the brain[1]. It opens with a collection of anecdotes from people as they struggled to remember things, events, habits that formed their lives prior to the pandemic.

The article calls it “the fog of forgetting”. Someone confessed that the decade-strong morning routine he’d kept—waking, showering, commuting to work—now seems unimaginable. Another noted that she’d keep losing her train of thought in the middle of a sentence more and more often. Another had completely forgotten a standing invitation for dinner, even when it was something she had loved attending for a long time.

Some experts say that’s OK, the brain forgets all the time, especially as a means to make space for new information. So perhaps this is just the brain putting some of our old actions in deep storage to make way for the new habits that will help us survive this pandemic—putting on masks, for example, or constant handwashing. Or in my case, remembering to change out of my outside gear by the door before moving further into the room every time I come back from getting something at our lobby.

However, the isolation of the lockdown also affects the brain some other ways.

“We’re all walking around with some mild cognitive impairment… Based on everything we know about the brain, two of the things that are really good for it are physical activity and novelty. A thing that’s very bad for it is chronic and perpetual stress. Living through a pandemic—even for those who are doing so in relative comfort—is exposing people to microdoses of unpredictable stress all the time.

That stress doesn’t necessarily feel like a panic attack or a bender or a sleepless night, though of course it can. Sometimes it feels like nothing at all. It’s like a heaviness, like you’re waking up to more of the same, and it’s never going to change… Like wading through something thicker than water. Maybe a tar pit.”

A common sentiment I see among friends is exhaustion—not just any kind of exhaustion, but rage exhaustion. Sure we are exhausted at work—don’t get any of us started haha—but even more exhausting is this anger we feel, day in and day out, at how the government is extraordinarily bungling its COVID-19 response, and seemingly on purpose, too.

“Ultimately… our winter of forgetting may be attributable to any number of overlapping factors. There’s just so much going on: It could be the stress, it could be the grief, it could be the boredom, it could be depression… It sounds pretty grim, doesn’t it?”

When I admitted to my manager about my forgotten coverage, I apologized profusely via email. She said it was OK; there’s so much going on, and it’s unavoidable for some things to fall through the cracks.

One of the business-y acronyms I am least fond of is BAU—business as usual. This acronym almost always crops up only when everything else is supposed to be unusual: when calamity strikes, for example, like a typhoon or an earthquake. Proceed like BAU. As if the world isn’t ending, Karen!

I have experienced the pandemic from a position of obscene privilege… And yet I feel like I have spent the past year being pushed through a pasta extruder. I wake up groggy and spend every day moving from the couch to the dining-room table to the bed and back. At some point night falls, and at some point after that I close work-related browser windows and open leisure-related ones.

Sometimes I imagine myself as a Sim, a diamond-shaped cursor hovering above my head as I go about my day. Tasks appear, and I do them. Mealtimes come, and I eat. Needs arise, and I meet them. I have a finite suite of moods, a limited number of possible activities, a set of strings being pulled from far offscreen… My world is as big as my apartment, which is not very big at all.

We’re trapped in our dollhouses… It’s just about surviving, not thriving[2]. No one is working at their highest capacity.

As we approach the anniversary of the lockdown[3], it is physically painful to admit that we haven’t really progressed as much as we wanted to. For all this government’s posturing re: “world-class government service”, it should not be forgotten that the country’s capital and main business district, along with several other cities, remained locked down in some form of community quarantine for the last twelve months, as a direct consequence of its inefficient pandemic response that prioritized politicking and silencing critics and keeping its obscene hold on power over an evidence-based and science-backed response that put the appropriate medical experts in leadership positions instead of military men, and prioritized the welfare of medical healthcare workers and frontliners instead of murderous policemen and soldiers.

Instead, what we have is this. Can you blame anyone for being angry all the damn time?

We have to grieve our last good days.

Anger, of course, is a necessary component of grief. And if anything, this lockdown anniversary feels like a death anniversary of sorts. This Atlantic story puts it best: We have to grieve our last good days[4]. With our mother, I could pinpoint my last moment with her: Before I left for school that morning, I climbed into bed and gave her a kiss as I said goodbye. She worried she’d give me her flu. It got so bad she had to be taken to the hospital later that day. And that was that.

With this pandemic, it’s kind of hard to tell. I spent that last week all cough-y, it was actually scary in retrospect. But we were all BAU. We went about covering events, attending face-to-face meetings, writing our stories, chasing after approvals, filing liquidation forms with finance. My teammates were still doing interviews and editing videos. We just put alcohol stations by the doors.

At some point, we thought it would just be prudent to beg our events team not to push through with several on ground activations for mid-to-end-March that they were asking us to cover. I remember how stubborn they wanted to be. Looking back, that was so damn foolish, but who could blame them? The pandemic loomed above our heads but we failed to grasp at the time how big it was going to be. And how terrible.

When the lockdown announcement came, we told each other, well maybe we’ll work for home for a bit. LOL. We told each other, See you in April! Well, maybe we meant 2022. At this point, we’ve learned how to temper our expectations accordingly.

“The way we turn those memories over and over is a symptom of grief. Everybody’s grieving something… whether that’s the loss of daily routine, a job, housing security, people they care about, loss of a sense of stability, or knowing what’s coming. With about 2.5 million dead and untold more suffering physically, economically, and psychologically, grief is a presence in every room, even if we don't always notice it.

The loss of the Last Good Day… is an ambiguous loss—a term for losses that don’t have clear resolutions and complicate the grieving process with unanswered questions. Ambiguous losses are less visible and in many cases less likely to be seen as “legitimate” than, say, the death of a loved one or the loss of a job. Ambiguous losses can be personal but they can also be societal: The loss of trust in the world, the loss of being able to touch your loved ones, the loss of your usual rituals—all of those things are hard to wrap our heads around.

I find myself wanting to apologize whenever I show sadness. I’m incredibly lucky, and I know it… I’ve lost nothing this year but the life I used to know. Which everyone else has lost, too. But it’s too much, isn’t it? To carry this weight and politely pretend that it doesn’t make us stumble because others are carrying more?

These days, it does feel like it’s every household for itself—I am thankful that I have C to navigate this pandemic with, because I’m not quite sure how would I have fared had I been alone. But still—hyperconnected as we are with our eyes glued on screens and feeds almost 24/7, we are all, essentially, just trying to make the best decisions on our own. My family is in three households—I doubt we’re treading the same path toward this “mythical exit”, wherever it is.

But one thing is certain: We are no longer the people we were, pre-pandemic[5]. A lot of the person I was does inform this pandemic version of me, but I doubt I’ll ever be a non-pandemic version of me, if this makes sense.

Your wife is now also your work wife. When she laughs in the other room, you ask what’s so funny and then you both laugh at the funny thing. You spend an unspeakable amount of time together. You find out things about each other’s formerly unobserved moments you were never meant to. At least not until retirement. Even though you’re both working, it kind of already feels like retirement: You hang around your place all day and take walks sometimes. You love each other to death, and you’re sick to death of each other—and you might go berserk if you were ever apart for more than a few hours. But you’re not.

You can’t wait to be back in crowds, but even more than that, you can’t wait until being back in crowds again has lost its novelty. You don’t want going out to feel like a rebuke to the pandemic. You just want it to feel like before. You don’t want to see crowds on TV and flinch anymore.

You are not the person you were before the pandemic. By this time next year, though, you will no longer be the person you are now.

You will design your new life. You will grieve your old one.

You will wake up one morning and go the entire day without thinking about the pandemic or the year that you lost your mind.

You will notice someone wearing a face mask for the first time in a while and it will destroy you.

You will never unlearn the things you now know about yourself, about how you handle an emergency and what you can withstand.

You will be okay. You will not be okay. You will be you. You won’t.

This has been long but I hope it has at least one thing that resonated with you.

ONE LAST THING…

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Maraming, maraming salamat for making it this far.

Keep safe, XO,

K