Quarantined Ruminations

It’s been a while.

It’s been a while for anything with me. Since the last quarter of 2019, I’ve spent months pushing people away, deleting social media accounts, isolating myself, and spending time with the darkest parts of my thoughts.

I knew it wasn’t good for me, that staring down at the rabbit hole that is myself would expose negative things I’ve kept within me for so long. The world is overwhelming, and it felt like I didn’t have a choice, I didn’t have control, I had nowhere to go. Injustice after injustice. Absurdity after absurdity. I couldn’t fathom to live in such a senseless world. The meds weren’t working. I was quitting.

I felt lonely, helpless, and hopeless.

I stared into an uncertain future.

I still grieved the loss of my father.

I stopped being me.

Then a pandemic hit.

I’ve been stuck with my cat for more than 3 months now. I remember having some mild flu back in February and another in March. Depression and flu don’t mix well, your brain wants to quit but your body wants to fight off a disease. I successfully fought whatever that flu was. Back then, you can only get tested for COVID when you’re critically ill. With how the testing is being handled in the Philippines, perhaps I’ll never know.

The world plunged into a crisis with lockdowns, quarantines, panic. Lives were at stake. I always found it weird that I feel calm during life and death scenarios. There was this one time, back in our old house, when heavy rain and clogged roof gutters caused a sudden flood in our living room. My mother scrambled to move things from one place to another. I followed suit. It was chaos. But I remember thinking: “This is nothing. We just move these things to a drier place, scoop up all this water, and wait for the rain to stop.” I just followed my mother’s commands. Doing something, thinking about nothing, until it was all over.

Maybe it’s trauma, maybe it’s normal, maybe it’s just a variation of the fight-or-flight response. Something to look into.

When the people of the world were forced to quarantine themselves in their homes, everyone was suddenly in survival mode. People were gathering up supplies, staying at home, monitoring their health, watching the news, being thrifty. Everyone safely updated themselves with their neighbors, talking with each other through barriers of glass and plastic.

All of it felt easy for me, maybe even natural. I felt alive. A world seemingly crumbling around me, with roads getting blocked and behaviors suddenly changing, yet everything felt as they should be. A world in crisis yet I was calm.

This was the world as I always saw it: vulnerable, fragile, senseless. All the pandemic did was expose the filth bubbling underneath the reality people felt was normal. The inequality, a gap that was always there, became much more apparent and lethal.

Through the routine of living in isolation, in the midst of a global pandemic, I slowly felt better living with myself.

My privileges in life has allowed me to live this long and be in a better position than most people. I am lucky to be able to articulate my thoughts, educate myself, medicate for my mental health problems, and take care of a cat.

But most people are less fortunate than I am, and this pandemic is more dangerous to them than it is to me. The governments of the world exposed their fangs, gnawing their way out of a situation that their corruption has failed to prepare them for. The world is in turmoil, as it always has been. The fascist governments of Russia, Brazil, Philippines, China still set in their violent ways; systemic racism in the US & Europe being unearthed; unrest in the Middle East continues with famines in Yemen, mass graves in Iran, and Israel taking more from Palestine. People’s lives are at the center of all of these. The future seems grim and uncertain.

Strands of RNA encased in fat — that’s essentially what the coronavirus is. That simple mechanism has pushed humanity into the perilous situation it is in now. It seems like humans are fragile creatures but I am continually reminded of the resilience of people. Communities banding together. Strangers helping strangers. A global network of minds tackling uncomfortable issues that has collectively plagued our thoughts.

All of this just makes me miss my father. I wish he could’ve read what I have just written and the things I have yet to write and make. He would’ve sent a long reply to it. He loved reading books and writing letters, and I inherited that from him. But he’s gone now and the world is still moving. And so I move on, too. I love you, Pa.

I’m beginning to read The Invisible Committee’s To Our Friends. In its preface it highlights a quote from Jacques Mesrine: “There is no other world, there’s just another way to live.” And as Carl Sagan would say, this pale blue dot is the only world we’ve ever known. Humanity is in a continuous struggle with itself and with nature, change being the only constant thing. As we move, the world moves with us and within us. It is up to us and our limited faulty sentience to steer that to wherever good it may lead.