I'm Not Okay; You're Not Okay: Dealing with 2020's Endless Denouement (Patreon)

Writing is hard.

This is not going to be me bitching about my job for 3000 words. I am well aware that all things considered, in the history of the world and the socio-economic map of this culture, my job is a beautiful glittering jeweled ice cream cone on top of a lovely lush green hill.

But writing is still hard.

Everything is hard. Remember when I used to tell you cute little anecdotes about the weather in Maine at the beginnings of these things? The gentle snow, the howling wind, the new flowers, the endless summer sun? But I stopped, because everything is hard and time decided it had become artistically stagnant and went full avant garde confrontational performance art and there just didn’t seem to be any point to telling you the crocuses have returned. Because everything is hard, harder now, but hard anyway, because the world is hard and adulthood is hard and work is hard and parenting is hard and loneliness is hard and living on the internet, a technology we were clearly not ready for as a species but definitely not ready to have all of us on it all the time using it for every part of our lives because the outside is poison.

And it’s okay that everything is hard. It’s okay to not be doing super well right now. It’s okay to be kind of sort of falling apart. It’s okay to be the howling wind and not the gentle snow.

I tell you this so you will hear it. I am also telling you this so I will hear it. (But in the end I am a big fluffy cartoon moose and I know that trick never works.)

And it’s okay, I promise you, if everything is still hard when, like some sort of reverse Sleeping Beauty, we all finally prick ourselves on that hypodermic spindle and the world wakes up again. If that doesn’t somehow magico-sciencely teleport you from this strange place you’ve gotten to somewhere full of squirrel-puppies (squppies) and happy candy daffodils that, let’s be honest, you probably weren’t exactly on the VIP list for in the Before Times.

It’s okay if you’re still not okay this time next year. Or the year after that. It is going to take so much more time to get past what just happened (and is still happening) to all of us over the last year. And it is all of us. But it almost never has been all of us for anything before, at least not in living memory. Some people didn’t lose anything in the 08 crash. Some countries stayed neutral in the wars of the 20th century, or were nowhere near the theater of action. With almost everything else bad that’s ever happened, millions and billions have not experienced it except through stories. But we all experienced this. And the whole planet is gonna need therapy, and relatively little of it will get it.

We’re going to be realizing how much we’ve changed, how much this has changed us, for decades, if not the rest of our lives. Like constantly looking down and noticing for the first time that yet another limb is missing, a finger, a knee, a toe. But sometimes, perhaps, it’s not missing, just changed. Our thumbs are green plaid. Our tongues are made of brick. Our feet are afraid of people. And we will repeat this over and over again. Some part of us we were sure was working fine a moment ago. But it’s wasn’t working fine. It was just that the urge to go on, to move forward, to pretend that everything is fine now was so powerful we couldn’t stop to take stock of our poor hurt beings.

Oh I guess I have uncontrollable anxiety attacks in crowded restaurants now.

Huh my kid doesn’t know roller coasters are real and not just a mythical creature from TV.

Shit I guess now I jump out of my skin whenever anyone coughs like a war vet hearing a car misfiring well that’s definitely not going to be a problem going forward.

Yes I compulsively buy too much flour and toiler paper at the store every time I go. Do you...not? What's that LIKE?

And then there will be things I can’t predict now. Like that plaid thumb. Little aftershocks of trauma that keep coming round the corner out of nowhere. Our whole psyches are going to be that jar of bacon grease our great-grandmothers kept in the back of the freezer for years, just in case, without even thinking about why she was doing it, why she needed to do it.

And on top of all that, writing is hard. Harder now than it was, no matter how hard it was before. And it’s okay if it stays harder for awhile. It’s okay if it stays harder forever. Trauma, pain, isolation, fear, caregiver fatigue, loss, and completely goddamned unending stress does not make confident people who can make bold choices with ease.

And it’s also okay if all the things that aren’t writing stay harder, too. If even getting fully dressed with skincare and hair-brushing and work shoes and pants with seams and makeup and a bra and a tie and whatever else just seems like so much more work than it used to, so much more pointless, so much less automatic. Everything has changed, right down to our assumptions about what a human day on a human planet looks like.

It’s okay if things that used to please you feel difficult and impossible. It’s okay if you don’t know what pleases you anymore. It’s okay if you don’t get over that for a long time. It’s okay to find new pleasing things, even if they seem silly or without purpose, like a cartoon island run by a raccoon tycoon. Just as an example.

It’s okay to prioritize joy for awhile. It’s okay to not be able to. It’s all okay.

I know a lot of people who took writing workshops and classes over the last year. Maybe I even taught some of them. And honestly, being able to do that, take critique and analyze choices and focus on art, is amazing. Especially as I think people were a little less gentle in those environments than they used to be--we were all on edge and trying to express control and expertise over something, anything, and it was so easy to forget how to Do a Social Interaction in the miasma of it all. 

And because writing is hard. Making choices for all these imaginary people when you can’t fucking make a good choice for your own self most days of the meaningless, boundaryless, insatiable timeblob the workweek has become. Caring which word is best when death is everywhere. Feeling like you have the authority to tell anyone anything about this world or another ever again. Making something out of nothing when nothing feels like it’s chewed down all the interesting edges of life. If you can do it at all, you’re doing great. If you can do your work, writing or not, well, you’re a miracle.

And if you can’t…it’s okay.

I haven’t been able to. Kind of a lot. I was prepared, I thought, to adjust my life to welcome a child. I did not realize that hot on the heels of maternity leave, the boulder of 2020 would smash into my face, that I would lose seven family members in six months, that I would lose all outside help with childcare, that I would suddenly be stuck on an isolated island I chose specifically to counterbalance how hardcore my social life so often was between touring, conventions, and just maintaining relationships all over the world. But then there was no balance. And I couldn’t even get food delivered like everyone else can. I’ve had to cook something from ingredients three times a day for almost the length of this whole ordeal, and to be honest, it has sapped so much of my joy in food to never have a break from the preparing of it. There’s probably a metaphor for stories and writing and literature in there but guess what, I’m too fucking tired to find it.

And it’s okay if you’re too fucking tired for the high-effort parts of existence right now, too. The fancy stuff. The extra. The above and beyond.

Right now? Babies, getting through the minimum is spectacular. Did you clean a room today? A whole fucking ROOM? Good lord, you’re crushing it! It would have been so easy just to NOT clean it, knowing it would just get messy again anyway, and you defied that domestic despair! Did you go outside? WHAT. ROCK STAR! Did you eat a vegetable? MIND BLOWN AT YOUR ACHIEVEMENT. Did you not get sucked into a really upsetting crazy-pants MMORPG with a super fucked up leveling system because you were so lonely, abandon all reason, kindness, and probably a lot of family members, and bust up, or strongly considered busting up, the Capitol building? Well, it looks like that was a lot harder than anyone gave you credit for, you deserve a fun-run style t-shirt at MINIMUM.

Did you do one tiny thing that made anyone, anywhere, smile? GET THIS HUMAN A TROPHY.

What the fuck, did you exercise? Now you’re just showing off. I heard you checked the mail today. Brought the bins in. Maybe even answered an email you’ve been avoiding. There’s even a hot rumor going around that you showered. With shampoo and conditioner. I can’t believe how fucking wonderful and capable you truly are.

Did you literally just get from one end of the day to the other without dying, anyone you’re in charge of dying, or any machine you need exploding? IT IS TIME FOR A GODDAMNED PARADE. CONFETTI AND EVERYTHING. I INSIST.

We are not Coke machines, no matter how much of this world wants us to be. Not artists, not anyone. You can’t just push a button, drop in a measly dollar, and get an art or an experience of love or a productive day every time, right on time, to order, just the flavor you want. Sometimes you hit the button and get a sad blinking yellow OUT OF ORDER message and that’s basically humankind at the moment. Blink, blink, blink.

This is an odd essay, I know. It’s meandering and not that funny and probably like always I use my CAPSLOCK BUTTON way too much. It doesn’t have a THESIS. Or a FIVE PARAGRAPH STRUCTURE. But I’m getting vaccinated this week and it’s been so long since these essays didn’t talk about the pandemic that I’m trying to be the bloody science fiction writer I’m supposed to be and guide you gently into a future full of rusty nails and body horror and just, you know, open fires everywhere all the time. The kind where you’re not even sure what’s actually burning in all that mess, there’s just a loose fire in the middle of the street, not in a barrel or a grill or anything.

We all joke a lot about the Before Times, because real life has taken on the terminology of eschatological fiction (ha ha! I found energy for a big word!) and suddenly talking like the heroine of a YA dystopia is just what we do. But we’re coming up on the After Times and I don’t think we’re any more prepared for that than we were for the pandemic. And it’s gonna be a monster sadness rally because nobody sends out stimulus checks or holds off on evictions or makes inspirational celebrity videos for a whole planet blown back by unprocessed trauma.

I mean, they never fucking did before, did they?

Over the course of the last 14 months, everyone who ever included a pandemic in their books has been hailed as a prophet of the new age, Nostradamus in an N95, absolute unit of prescient wisdom. But I don’t think anyone really got it. I don’t think anyone really understood what kind of shit exactly this shitshow would feature. Writers are too obligated to the demands of the market. We want to make it exciting. We want to make it meaningful. We want the acts to be clearly delineated. We want the action to be so compelling. We want to have deep and valuable revelations, not just “wtf I hate food now.”

The appeal of apocalyptic stories has always been, in part, that the bureaucratic annoying problems of the modern world go away and everything is immediate and new and we all start over, those of us who survive. But the world didn’t go away. We all still have debt and obligations and records and bills and actually probably a whole lot of new all those things. It’s the same world but worse, heavier, and more boring, but in a really stressful way. No prepped signed up for that.

It all just happened and it was a mess and nobody really learned anything and now we’re all a mess and in a minute we’re going to be expected to act like we’re not a mess for like…I guess the rest of our lives, so that the economy and social interaction and school and the Fun Times people apparently feel is absolutely owed with back pay, but mostly the economy, can get their groove back. This shit was grey and lonely and boring and it didn’t excite the dormant wild thing within (maybe the hoarder within or the profiteer within for some of us I’M LOOKING AT YOU STEVE WITH YOUR THRONE OF TOILET PAPER), it just slowly took away everything we valued and left more grey. There was madness, but we mostly watched it on screens and worried and worried and worried.

What we’re in right now is the denouement. Hopefully. And I don’t think we really know what to do with all the tension that’s built up in our bones. I don’t think we know how to clean up the theater and turn the lights back on, quite. There will be a rush of activity, of course their will, and any sweet little taste of Before will be like Pop Rocks on our tongues and we will appreciate this mechanized industrial postmodern consumption-ball for a moment as perhaps no other generation has, but after…after we realize that we were putting way, way too much stock in a haircut or a concert’s or a trip’s ability to make it all go away, make it all better, make it stop, it’s gonna get rough out there.

And that’s okay. That’s all I want to say to you. Writers have the luxury of ending books when the vaccinations roll out. But we don’t, we have to figure out what the next story is, and it’s going to be hard. Because writing is hard. And right now we’re writing us, we’re writing tomorrow, we’re writing each other and how we will change, how we will be, how we will love, how we will heal, or not heal at all.

What the pandemic did, for those of us who made it, and so, so many of us did not, was sit in the middle of 21st century capitalist life like a big fat pissed-off stegosaurus and make it impossible to continue with the patterns of life on autopilot. And, it turned out, tons of us were rolling on cruise control. That’s why all those people get so mad at masks. It’s why they refuse to admit there’s a stegosaurus on the lawn. Everybody’s lawn. It’s why they cry because they suddenly want a haircut so bad. It’s why they fly to Cancun. Going through life on autopilot was something they treasured, and never imagined could be taken away. I’m not even being judgey about this. No matter what life is like, even at its worst, you eventually settle into a pattern and repeat that for a long while unless something kicks you out of it. Death, divorce, a war, a crash, something, anything. It’s how we conserve energy for the parts of life we really value. We took for granted that having progressed to a certain state of technological and social advancement, it was impossible to stop it. Too big to fail and all that summer child 2008 talk. But it could. It could stop. Down to the tiniest pleasures we took so powerfully for granted we didn’t even understand we were taking them for granted.

Having to see people wearing masks and staying inside and every door closed meant not being able to just cruise through to the next good part. Meant having to dwell in this moment directly and this moment was GARBAGE.

Meant having to see the stegosaurus. Even if just for a minute. They couldn’t bear it. Autopilot was all that was holding them together. Me too, sometimes. Absolute reality sucks balls. I think Shirley Jackson said that.

And the stegosaurus wasn’t even cool! A T-Rex, you could at least wonder if it was going to freak out and rip the roof off to get to you. A stego is just there, and it won’t stop being there, and you can’t do anything while it’s there, but if you stayed inside and didn’t provoke it, you’d probably be okay. It would just…stomp on about 2 in every hundred people at random. For a year.

It’s not what we were led to expect from dinosaurs. And there is such a peculiar shame to feeling disappointed in that, but it was a very real sentiment going around. Well. Like a cold.

So now, for a minute, we aren’t going to be on autopilot, we are going to be so fucking thirsty for experience and people and novelty that a baby boom will probably be the least of the knock-on effects. People are going to lose it, to varying extents and entertainment factors.

The plain fact, is, we all have long COVID now. And we have no idea what it will do to us. What organs of self it will inhabit. What changes it will force.

And that’s okay. It has to be, because it’s what we’ve got. Just know that you did a really good job surviving this. All those people who bleated into social media about how perfect a time this was to write a timeless novel or start a business were being awkward and offputting as fuck. They are still awkward and off putting as fuck when they tell in your face motivationally that now is the time to dominate the paradigm or whatever. And I say that as someone who did indeed write a (probably not timeless) novel in 2020. All you actually had to do was hold on, keep some part of yourself from withering away or taking the stego tail to the face, and you did that. So did I.

It’s not nothing. Just being here, on this side of the 2020s, is everything.

I want you all to enjoy the world as it comes back. Enjoy walking into a store, seeing another human being smile, and buying a candy bar. Or soap. Or a little plastic stegosaurus. Yes, yes, capitalism is terrible, but it’s not actually your direct fault. You are allowed to enjoy consuming things. Feel every second of sitting in a restaurant. Seeing a movie. Going on a date. Drinking coffee or tea you didn’t make. Be as present as you can. That drink will never taste quite the same again as it will this summer. Hold onto it. To being alive, here and now and with the rest of us intolerable bastards.

And if you can’t, quite? If you can’t feel the exuberance everyone, including my dumb mouth, is saying you should? That’s okay. Honey, that's fine. We’ll get there again somehow, eventually. Healing isn’t fast, not real, profound healing. And most likely the world will take another shot before we can even get our feet pointed in the right direction because boy was optimism one of the first casualties.

I’ll tell you this right now, and I know it’s the truth: the first time I walk into a convention next year, a real in-person convention with human beings and panels and cosplayers and events and readings and talks, I’m going to be fucking terrified. I’m going to feel sick. I’m going to want to hide. I will not be okay. I will be grateful, I will be looking forward to at last returning to those weekends I took so deeply for granted. I will be SO EXCITED. But I will not be okay. If you see me, you can tell me you’re not okay, too.

Or that you are, and how you did it.

Writing is hard. One of the hard things about it is getting to the ending where everything is okay. Just getting there. Getting everyone there, realistically, elegantly, satisfyingly. We never get there in life but for a moment here, a moment there, and those moments are even harder to orchestrate than in fiction. We write our lives every day. We write who we will be in ten years today. We make, and fail to see, our own foreshadowing with every choice. With every hello to a stranger and every goodbye to pain. And a lot of choices were taken away in 2020. We will have to learn to make them again. Boldly or gently, the whole array of overwhelming screaming life is heading down the barrel toward us and we have to integrate who we are now with it. With a huge fuck-off stegosaurus whose brain can’t handle its tail for shit.

And every tiny thing you do, from eating a vegetable to showering to checking the mail to not falling into an internet pit of internet vipers, all of that counts, it counts so powerfully, against the grey, the nothing, the paralytic introvert’s apocalypse we have all endured. They are acts against entropy. Against uncaring. Against giving up.

And I am so proud of you for those acts. I am so proud of you for getting to the end of this chapter. For living, for trying, for doing what’s hard. Someday, you and me are gonna be okay.

And if it’s not today, or tomorrow, or even this year? That’s fine, my loves. I’ll meet you in the sun all the same.