6 month roll call - check in here please

yep

I've been pretty lucky I think, while a few people I know have been sick, no one has died and my immediate family are still healthy. Lockdown moved into a new phase around the beginning of May when it went from 'oh shit what are we going to do' to 'this is just how we live now', the medium term future at work is still a concern but I'm fortunate enough to be able to take some time out if the worst happens there. There's been time to pursue some personal creative projects, and spending six months all day every day with yr significant other in extremely anxious circumstances is a major stress test for a relationship which we've come through just fine.

Growing sense of trepidation at the changing of the seasons, we're lucky to have loads of green space immediately around us which has made an enormous difference to our ability to go out, enjoy the summer, see friends and family and generally feel part of the world. That disappears when the weather turns and I'm not ready to socialise indoors just yet. IDK, October and November could be rough.

Did get a train into Central London today for the first time to experience the ghost town for myself, and it was fine despite the occasional prick still refusing to wear a mask on the train.

Positive vibes to everyone here.

Microsoft sssssoom will be getting laldy in the run up to Xmas it’s true

same at Matt. we're pretty lucky. we have jobs and we've got a relative living with us who can help with the kids so we can actually work and not send the kids to school, which I suspect will be shut down in a couple weeks anyway. but I find myself in a bad place mentally, going from "okay we're gonna be locked down for a couple months, lets try to make the most of it" to "there's really no end to this in sight is there?", dreading the winter and how stir crazy we're all gonna get. god I wish I could go out for a motherf'in beer with the boys right now

Had the virus in April but recovered and I’ve apparently got a high rate of antibodies so I’m donating plasma. Saw Trump had apparently claimed plasma was a miracle cure so now I’m doubting myself. Eyesight has gotten worse since I was sick so can’t read books anymore unless they are ebooks. But on the whole the year has been pretty good for me, especially compared to others. Enjoy checking in here to read folks speak more eloquently and enthusiastically about music than I can. Hope I can get outside again for extended periods of time soon, I miss the wilderness

i'm usually reluctant to post on personal threads on ilx, but i will say that i'm doing well, all things considered. still have a job, managed to get a car to escape nyc at times, and oh yeah, i got married in mid-August! i was nervous as all hell about the ceremony/reception endangering all the people i love most, but we kept it small (18 people, which still feels/felt big but the original plan was to have hundreds) kept social distance for the most part, and we've passed the two-week period without incident. we got lucky, but i still don't know if we made a truly safe or sensible decision. still, we're grateful that it worked out safely, and we really needed this moment for our relationship and to break up the monotony of the past 6 months.

Congrats vc :)

Many congratulations, vc!

Yes! and hb sleeve!

Worlds that is scary and I hope your eyesight recovers! Won’t suggest a drive to a faraway castle

I'm newly unemployed after taking voluntary redundancy in August from the job I'd been doing for the last 20 years. Kind of exciting, also kind of scary. Not exactly sure what I'll do next but can survive okay for the next few months while I think things through. Feels like a really good chance to finally point my life in a better direction than it had been headed in, so let's try not to make a complete balls up of it eh

And yes, hb to sleeve and good wishes to all

Glad you're here, CP <3

And congrats VC!

We were supposed to be having our marriage celebration this autumn, but decided to put it on hold...We also got married without telling anyone last September, though, so it's not necessarily a thing we've been really thinking about a lot.

I’ve been going into work as normal for months now - don’t believe I’ve mentioned - so as weird as everything is I haven’t had the experience of being locked up for half a year, what with being busy and a lot of things being open it can feel almost normal. The summer passed in an eyeblink which is par for the course for harvest.

The first half of this period feels like a million years ago. I was furloughed for 3 weeks and for a few weeks before that I was pretending to wfh and occasionally going into work proper, and I mainly remember absolutely everything being eerie.

I would struggle to come up with a positive in any of this (well, I have been walking the 4 miles home to cut down on bus usage and liking it enough that I may keep it up post-pandemic)(then again my feet hurt all the time) but generally I am doing ok considering. Like Matt I am worried about the winter, a fairly grim time for me at the best of times (and I think there is a lot of denial about)

Oh and I guess this whole thing pushed me off the wagon, I’d spent 2020 sober up till lockdown

best wishes and thanks to all!

feel ya wins, it's hard to stay on the wagon when things are falling apart. one thing i've learned in this period is that i don't much like drinking, i just like drinking with people i like.

yeah I have not had a hangover in 6 months, that's pretty nice

The first half of this period feels like a million years ago.

crazy to think Tiger King came out like....4 months ago

Once I had broken the seal (which happened just before lockdown tbf) I just went for it and was v disgraceful, I did the recycling walk of shame a lot in lockdown. Also got some pretty dece wines via deliveroo, a level of decadence I can’t see allowing myself now

It's good to see you posting again, Colonel P. Here's hoping for better days ahead for you (and all of us).

I've posted enough about my situation for anyone interested to know that I'm getting along with very few covid-19-induced problems, physical, emotional or financial. It helps immensely to live with someone I love, so I have daily hugs and always someone to talk to. The hardest part is not being able to give the same kind of direct support to our daughter; we can visit her at her group home, but we must be outdoors, masked, socially distanced and cannot touch her. I walk and read every day and this also helps me keep my equilibrium.

I've been working regularly from home since St. Patrick's Day, which has helped keep me functional. (The other day I had to go into downtown DC to get my IT credentials renewed, which was weird, but everyone I met working onsite was nice.) I know that Facebook is a vector for all the evils of the world as we know it, but dangit, I've got a supportive network there.

Our city's been in enforced severe lockdown for 5 weeks now (not allowed to leave the house at all unless getting essentials/must wear mask/curfew (!!) after 8pm) and its starting to cause a lot of fractious shit in our population which is dperessing. Im drinking more again because wtf who cares anymore. I'm lucky I can work from home and financially we're doing well but ugh. Im feeling so inert and fat and weird.

Reading tons. Listening to music, reacquainting myself with old musical loves. Some are better left as memories! I draw so I've been working daily on mastering how to approximate my analog artwork in the digital realm. I feel I'm getting there. There are small, sometimes big(ish) breakthroughs almost every day. Same goes for my mastering the Dutch language (I've lived here in Netherlands since June of '19). Prospects for work are slim as a video editor - I was in US TV for almost 15 years but that don't mean diddly nowadays- and most postproduction jobs here require a mastery of the language. I'm cool with that. I'll get it. Luckily no friends and/or loved ones have been visited by the virus so that's been a relief. Just a daily float, keeping anxiety at arms length, meditating helps.

Love to all. I'm happy you're here.

I've been working from home since 2017, so quarantine wasn't the biggest adjustment ever. Actually started my first go-to-an-office job in mid-March, and was sent home two days later. The job only lasted 8 weeks, but I made enough money in those eight weeks to build up a decent cushion. None of my freelance opportunities have dried up. I managed to get almost $20,000 from the Small Business Administration, which I'm going to use for some interesting projects in the coming months. My wife and I celebrated our 27th anniversary in June, and we have no kids, so we've just been hanging out reading, making art (her), writing a book and submitting a proposal for another book to a publisher (me), and watching stuff on Netflix and Hulu. I have no IRL friends (my two best friends from high school died young years ago), just people I'd see at jazz or metal shows once in a while, so I talk to my brother and my mother every once in a while by phone or email and that's it. Nobody I know has gotten sick or died this year. I've been having a pretty good year, honestly.

A handful of family and friends infected, mostly in the early days, none fatally thank fucking goodness. Myself & partners jobs not impacted, and I've been working from home for a handful of years now so it hasnt been that much of a lifestyle change. One of the overriding feelings has been one of gratitude and thankfulness - everything about this time has made me appreciate my blessings and comforts in a completely new way. I had a no-doubt-about-it-you-are-old birthday the other day, and looking back at the last few months rather than my usual aging birthday anxiety or anything, I'm living in this constant daily state of awareness and appreciation for every good thing in my life: four walls, roof, food security, loving partner, living family, ability to breathe without much effort, continued access to the music of Curtis Mayfield, etc.

Anxiety and depression are still bountiful of course (while we have been extraordinarily well-quarantined since March, partner is having some friends over for a distanced backyard hang later today and I am slightly freaking out about it), but overall if you told me back on March 1st what the next 6m would be like, I would never have expected I'd be anywhere close to this level of "OK, considering".

I have mixed feelings about the effect the pandemic has had on my own life. Moving back to Canada was in many ways a bigger change for me this year than going into lockdown and while I will need to fly back to the UK in a few months – a prospect I'm none too enthused about given the risks associated with air travel right now – it all seems vaguely irrelevant to me, as though there were more pressing underlying concerns to address, concerns that have lingered for several years and that the pandemic has foregrounded not so much because of the shift in lifestyle it has impelled – I have been mainly working from home for what feels like ages now – as because of the strange experience (for me, at least) of suddenly being on the same wavelength as everyone else, which, if anything, has further emphasized the extent to which that was not the case pre-Covid-19. As a result, I don't feel as bad about 'not fitting in' (which is more or less true in practice, but I'm talking about my own perception here) and have become less outwardly (and inwardly) apologetic about my convictions (or lack thereof) when they're out of step with whatever group I happen to be interacting with at a given point in time.

This is all quite abstract, to be sure, but all in all I'd say it's been a positive development, and it also goes to show how little of a serious impact it's had on me and my close ones: my family and friends are all fine, and I don't know anyone who's had Covid-19. Lockdown at my parents' place did get kind of weird towards the very end (shockah!) but that's all but forgotten at this point. We've also been routinely seeing friends in the park and on our respective balconies and terraces since lockdown was lifted, so while we haven't socialized as much as we would have under normal circumstances, it still feels fine, all things considered (winter is bound to be more of a challenge, though, so perhaps the 9 month roll call will yield different results on my end). We're also at less 200 new cases a day in Quebec (for a pop. of approx. 8.5 million) despite the fact that kids started going back to school last week, so I'm nowhere near as worried as I was in April.

pom fwiw air travel itself looks reasonably low risk due to the HEPA filters in the planes:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/all-your-coronavirus-travel-questions-answered-11582980999

Airport is probably more of a risk in itself, but should be OK as long as you mask up.

Might just be the airline lobby pushing that narrative lol but yeah, that seems sound. Tbh even if I were to catch it somewhere, I'm sure I'd have nothing to worry about in the long-run, but it does appear to be a bit of a traumatic experience while you're in the midst of it.

I know several people who have taken international flights (including one who flew from the UK to Canada fwiw) and they've come out of it fine. It's not risk free but you're probably safer on a flight than you are on a train.

Interesting. Come to think of it, there's also the coach/train/cab once you land, which I had no doubt willingly forgotten about...

The headline for me is that my (14yr old) boy's anxiety has spiralled out of control and is manifesting as severe OCD - to the point where he doesn't really have anything else. He's essentially paralyzed by it and it's dominating his whole day (such as it is). His obsessions were always centred around disease and morbidity so this is like someone serving up his worst fucking nightmare. It can take him four hours to get out of bed, and in the last couple of weeks he is getting stuck - in the lounge, the hallway, his bedroom - and I've had to come and rescue him more than once from the lounge at 4, 5, 6 in the morning. Poor little bastard is in total disarray. Mercifully, we're in line for some counselling in the next couple of weeks. I'm hoping and praying that somehow (if we can get him out of the house) the routine associated with going back to school will kickstart some semblance of a recovery.

It seems impossible to say 'other than this' but the early part of lockdown really was kind of idyllic. My job (secondary school teacher) is pretty brutal and I was more than ready for a break - as were we all. It's only really in the last month that things have spiralled out of control. We've somehow survived as a family and my wife is amazing (she's a maternity nurse and has worked throughout the whole thing and not blinked an eye at what she's had to put up with). Despite everything, we are kind of blessed.

tl;dr: was bad, better now.

I've been doing...not great, mentally/emotionally. Partially moved house in January, dealt with spouse's medical emergency including surgery in February just as the news of people dying from this virus within a few miles of where we live broke, was ill with something in early March but couldn't be tested due to shortages and not having the exact symptoms being listed at that point. Finished moving the day before the initial lockdown. Started working from home full-time in mid-March. And not sleeping. Insomnia all the time, maybe getting 3 hours/night, up at all hours. PTSD massively increased. Became unable to leave the apartment. Paralyzed about everything but could still work, so threw myself at it, working a ridiculous amount but fucking up things due to not sleeping. Always on alert, hypervigilant and so angry. Ate badly because why not we are all gonna die horribly from this but didn't start back on booze (lol it started making me feel completely awful the next day about 5 years ago so I just...stopped). Threw $ at every cause and campaign and individual that mattered to me. Grandchild was due to be born in late July in Florida and I just circled and circled on what to do (see: paralyzed). Stopped being able to play games; couldn't read; couldn't watch anything; couldn't knit. One of my team tested positive (in Florida), his 1-year-old caught it from daycare and his wife also infected - he was unable to work for 2 weeks and I started with fits of sobbing around this point.

Started having weird physical symptoms in late May which finally drove me to go to the doctor - postponed and postponed due to...just couldn't. When I did get there in mid-July, had to complete the annual mental health screening. Came away with referrals for specialists for the physical symptoms (biopsy results came back Friday: benign hooray) and a prescription for an SNRI for major depressive episode+crippling anxiety.

6 weeks later, the SNRI is doing its job and anxiety is manageable and I'm sleeping and PTSD is reduced. Work offered an early retirement deal in May I qualified for and I jumped on it without even thinking - last day is end of Sept. Still working 50-60 hours/week 'til then but am okay. Multiple people from various parts of my life died from the virus over a 2 week period and it was awful. Don't feel exactly hopeful or anything but am able to leave the house as needed. Have zoomed with the grandbaby, still no idea about visiting in person though. It's a rollercoaster and I hate rollercoasters. The social worker assigned to check on me with the meds has got me starting with a therapist - they are all so booked up right now, everyone is struggling so much, but that's in a few weeks. So - it's been rough mostly due to my traitor of a brain/limbic system and I'm relieved to not be where I was at in April/May/June.

<3

jaq <3

<3 -- it sounds like you've been dealing with stratospheric stress levels, Jaq!

This is exactly the kind of thread where I never feel like sharing but love to everyone, cheers to all those able to celebrate anything in this colossal mess, and please be safe. That’s a wish not an order.

I’m not a person of faith but I do feel extremely confident there’s a light at the end of this.

Love to you Jaq, it sounds like it’s been hell, and hopefully you are on the other side of it now.

Chinaski, sorry to hear about your boy. If this had happened seven years ago, this would have been me too - sounds very similar to my worst bout, and crippling is exactly what it is. Is there any talk of putting him on medication? Counselling helps but the thing that puts a spoke in it is medication.

Thank you gyac. I think it's inevitable: I don't see how else he finds a way to rise out of the miasma long enough to come to terms with what's happening to him.

<3 to everyone here. I've been away from posting much due to...things but was always comforted to know I could check in and catch up.

aw Jaq, sending you good vibes

Well this is a nice idea, let's go...

There was something on daytime TV that mentioned 'have you had a good lockdown?' and the funny thing was, was that I thought to myself, yes I have. We both had a trip to Sorrento booked for early March, and even as we drove to the airport we wondered 'should we go?' but we did and it was great:Covid hadn't got to South Italy, (it had to south England), and on return I was suggested I should WFH for a fortnight. A few weeks later (after I'd returned to the office) most of my colleagues were furloughed but I and three others were kept on full working from home. Which I have to say helped, as my wife was also wfh for the same five months. (oh and BTW, hell yeah!)

Anyway, come August and I get made redundant as most of my team get brought back, so I should be angry but it's been a relief in a way. Nice bunch of money, and a chance to go do something more interesting. OK, it's been a week. It might go horribly wrong. But, I've had the payoff before and managed to come back so we shall see.

Anyway, we've had no Covid illnesses in the family, we've managed to get through lockdown alright, and managed to get out and see people 'responsibily'. We've had to cancel a trip to Malaysia in Nov, but that's about it.

I've read some but not all of the entries here, but I shall do, now.

Jaq, warmest wishes to you. Sounds like a rough time.

And Chinaski, I have a dear friend with a teen who has some similar symptoms and preoccupations as yr boy. Love to yr family.

Good vibes to all, especially those dealing with losing loved ones. Just before lockdown, I lost the only other left-wing person in my family to cancer. The space she occupied in my life is immense: she would have my back when others in my family were being mendacious, racist or gaslight-y. I find myself wondering if the viral pneumonia she caught about six weeks before she died was COVID-adjacent but it’s a thought I mostly keep to myself. Since the killing of George Floyd, I haven’t spoken to my sister or mother because they try to share anti-BLM bullshit with me; my cousin would have agreed with me and backed me up. At least my mom and sister don’t indulge in weird COVID denialism.

With all this other stuff going on, lockdown itself was not a chore for me - I work from home anyway, and don’t spend a lot of money generally. Central London didn’t have as many weird shortages as a lot of other places and I’ve been doing ‘essential’ work on a farmer’s market stall once a week (it’s good to have a job like that as a freelancer to take the edge off waiting to be paid for everything else). During lockdown I was scrupulous about masks and gloves, and didn’t touch alcohol unless I was sanitising my hands. I got a nice chunk of SEISS money, and replaced my ancient computer, which means I can now do zooms and look for a WFH job. Since there’s no way I’ll be able to travel outside the UK for a while, I’m finally going to get a dog of my own.

Thanks for the kind wishes, table is the table. What a fucking year. All the best to everyone here.

I adjusted quickly to the restrictions, and haven't experienced any significant difficulties since. I lost my DJ income, but have made up for it by stepping up my Discogs sales. My partner, although not currently earning, has indirectly been made a great deal better off financially due to Covid, so that's eased a lot of anxieties. We count our blessings, and there are plenty to count. We are helping a number of people out, in various ways. I've taken to Zoom far more than I thought I would. We live in the middle of a small market town, so I bump into people I know all the time, which keeps isolation at bay. Everything is more or less fine. Weird, but fine.

Really sorry to hear from those who've had/having an awful time - Jaq, CP, and Chinaski that sounds tough as hell. This whole thing has really been an assault on all levels imo.

Feeling lucky to be in a situation where we've not had to change too much (already setup for home working etc) and a location with low case numbers, although I'm wary they are rising. The biggest blow Covid-wise was the schools closing which felt scarily dystopian and limbo-like. It's been a weird few months, with deaths of old and new acquaintances, but nothing directly related to Covid as far as I can tell. Until the recent case numbers it did feel like a slow return to some kind of normal - was able to go on our planned trip away, even ate in a pub for the first time in 6 months. And lockdown forced me to find new, quiet, places to visit near home, which have been great finds.

Bumping this cos November and it’s just shit all round, isn’t it.

A thing I have realised about myself, much to my surprise, is that I do miss and need people.

My whole life, since I was about two, I have been pretty self sufficient, always as happy reading by myself as playing with others (and sometimes more). In work, I’ve been pretty good at pushing myself when I’m not getting any external motivation. And, like everyone else I work with, I hated our office!

Everyone I have said this to is a bit surprised, but none more so than me. When this all ends, I’ll be doing a lot more stuff with my friends and going home more than I was before. It’s necessary.

Amen. My dreams have involved spending time with loved ones every single night for months now, as if I'm only able to truly process the sense of loss subconsciously.

i'm a fuckin mess tbh

don't even think i can really blame it on the pandemic, unfortunately

ah, mookie, v sorry to hear that.

I’m a mess too but only on weekends when i have time to myself. Idle hands are the devils playthings. Work keeps me sane and on track and on the wagon. On the bright side a couple of my photographs will be featured in a tiny magazine next month.

Sorry to hear that, mookie, and I think you should feel free to blame anything you want on the pandemic. It certainly hasn't made anything better.

I just booked my first flight since the pandemic started - I'm going to Chicago for one night in January to see the Vulgar Boatmen, assuming things stay relatively safe for the vaccinated. It's a silly sort of trip but I really want to go. I'm trying to make myself do more things like that because generally I feel like my life keeps getting smaller since the pandemic, like there are fewer and fewer things that I even think about doing. Even just going to a thrift store or whatever feels like a big undertaking that I need to structure my day or possibly week around.

One positive development is that I finally started writing for that Springsteen blog, entirely bc of encouragement I got from ilx. It's the first time since college that I've brought myself to put any kind of writing out there under my own name, so even though it's a baby step it feels really big to me. I didn't write at all for the first year of the pandemic; it just felt like my brain wouldn't focus and there was no way to know what to say about anything. So being able to concentrate and finish anything, however small, feels like some kind of progress.

and congrats calstars!

thanks folx <3

I can understand being a mess, am blaming it on the pandemic

I can't say life is a bowl of cherries for me, but in the midst of seeing so many other lives around me in dire straits, I must confess my own life is pretty stable and reasonably stress-free, because the stresses I experience are (to borrow some nursing jargon) 'within normal limits'.

As weird as it might sound, 2020 and 2021 have not even cracked the top ten of the worst years I've lived through. God grant this doesn't change abruptly. It always could and I humbly acknowledge it.

everything sucks, news at 11

oh, VG! so sorry to hear it, even without the details. you aren't one to complain about a few nicks and scratches.

at least i still have this place to air my half-assed takes about north american sports

not joking in the least

Doing okay, working too much, husband is ever on the verge of quitting his job but has prospects elsewhere, dogs have some issues but doing okay...I dunno, I've been through some rough patches this year, but considering how terribly many other people I know are doing, I'm okay.

I'm also trying to figure out what I should be focusing on professionally. I'm getting paid to write and teach (in multiple formats to multiple age groups) and edit (both medical editing and manuscript editing), but I would really love to quit medical editing because it is more of 9-5 job and sucks the life out of me...though it pays better than any other gig I've ever had. Trying to ride it out until it seems like I'm able to quit it, but in the meantime, I'm dumb busy.

doing quite poorly! High five!

I didn't love everything about my pre-pandemic life but if I could go back 18 months and press pause on everything I wouldn't think twice about doing it. I hope everyone who is struggling at least feels the sense that this won't be like this forever.

honestly i'm doing pretty good, mental health is better than it has been over the past few years, relationship continues to be very good. work is ok, could be so much worse. i can pay my bills every month with a little left over. actual job is very cush, a few rough bits with the boss but i'm working through them. blocking out family has been a big help. we're entering inversion season here, which means low to mid grade brain pain for me for the next three months, but i'm hanging in there.

poor boyfriend has a bad job working for horrible small business owners, the prospect of what to do next has him feeling a little overwhelmed. seems like the one constant thing in 2021 is the feeling that horrible people demanding exhausting and meaningless work in order for us to survive are sort of retrenching themselves everywhere and everyone is playing along, like of course it has to be this way, and no one has any power to change anything. such whiplash after a year of being shown that all of this damaging shit we're doing is completely made up, unreal, and we could do something different if we weren't so impoverished in the cultural imagination department, weren't quite so addicted to pain and ignorance.

Checking in to report new house, new dog, new job on way and all well

such whiplash after a year of being shown that all of this damaging shit we're doing is completely made up, unreal, and we could do something different if we weren't so impoverished in the cultural imagination department, weren't quite so addicted to pain and ignorance.

This is so otm and what keeps eating away at me. Watching decision makers and people "in charge" slide immediately back into damaging and unhealthy patterns and ways of working that were proven to be completely unnecessary only a year ago has been so utterly demoralizing. It bleeds over into so much other areas of life that I just feel really hopeless, if this couldn't instigate meaningful change, what hope in hell do we have of tacking the even larger issues (i.e. climate change).

Typed out some despairing thoughts that I decided not to post, short response is mental & emotional health moderately worse over 2021. But career, relationship, & material conditions are all either the same or better, so thats good.
As stressful and traumatic as 2020 was, looking back the dominant emotion that colors my memories of it is gratitude - I often found myself almost physically overwhelmed with gratitude, counting blessings constantly, seeing everything with fresh eyes, understanding myself, my relationships, and my priorities in ways that I never before had, etc. At the end of 2021, lets just say that headspace is much much harder for me to access. But I am trying hard not to lose sight of it.

To keep it positive, one good thing is that after going through long stretches of the pandemic feeling like I basically never want to write or create again, I stumbled into a project that interests me & feels worth doing for the first time in a long time, and have been enjoying getting back in touch with the feeling of working on something youre really excited about. So, small things.

On that note: congrats Lily Dale, really been enjoying the Springsteen pieces you've been posting.

i felt like i could have written myself (in much poorer fashion) this excerpt from a recent Justin EH Smith substack

At many points over the past decades I have managed to convince even myself that I am cured. In fact I had managed to do this for almost twenty years, until the beginning of the pandemic, when the repressed returned with a vengeance. I do not believe that I “came down with depression” at that moment, and I especially hate the French habit of speaking of “une dépression”, as if the condition were as individuable and as temporally bounded as a cold. Just as inadequate is the oft-repeated Churchillian metaphor of depression as “the black dog”. If only it were a black dog, I could just kick the fucking thing away. I do not “have” “a” depression, let alone a depression hounding me in the form of an external malevolent agent. Rather, I am depressed, and certain circumstances make this fact less easy to ignore than others. In the event, the circumstances surely had something to do with the first lockdown of March, 2020, which we endured in Brooklyn, right next to the hospital in Fort Greene where they stored the corpses outside in refrigerated trucks. My own experience of covid was mild in its symptoms, but I emerged from lockdown transformed, physically and psychologically.

I will try to describe in a few words what it has been like since then. The most striking thing about this new life is that the whole world looks to me somewhat the way our elementary schools look to us when we revisit them as adults: a place we don’t belong anymore, a place that seems so much smaller and so much more modest than we had once taken it to be, so disenchanted that one is left perplexed as to how it could ever have been the source of such wild flights of the hopeful imagination. Life has a quality now that can only be described as “spectral”. I have sometimes imagined that I must have ended up in one of those refrigerated trucks myself, and everything I’ve experienced since then is just me haunting the old sites of my life, as in the Nicole Kidman vehicle The Others (2001) where she believes her home is infested by poltergeists but slowly comes to realize she and her kids are the ghosts, while the “ghosts” that torment her are just regular human beings.

A second feature of this new “mature” manifestation of depression (as opposed to its “juvenile” expressions in California, New York, Ohio) is what the diagnosticians sometimes call “derealization”. I have moments where I just cannot believe that any of this is real. I used to mock Nick Bostrom’s “simulation hypothesis”; now, most of the time, it seems to me intuitively obvious (if still not for the reasons he thinks) that the world is not at all what we take it to be. This shift manifests itself partly in a collapse of the system of values that had previously enabled me to take seriously all the clamoring after social distinctions —all the prizes and acclaim I used to find it meaningful to seek— that keep our institutions running and our little lives full. But more strongly, at certain moments I find myself literally unable to comprehend how I ever could have taken the social bodies that offer the prizes and acclaim, or indeed the opprobrium and rejection, to be in any sense real.

This derealization surely has something to do with the very real historical process of dematerialization: institutions really are disintegrating as they shift to videoconferencing and e-mail as the primary channels of their endurance. What made universities real for some centuries, for example, were in large part their august edifices. These still exist, generally, but they seem increasingly disconnected from whatever it is we still pretend to be doing under the universitarian banner. Anxiety enables me to keep doing my work under this same banner, but I find myself unable to recall how I once accepted it all, unquestioningly, as real. At its most intense, my incomprehension extends not just to social reality (work, recipes, “sport”, popular entertainments, and most of all politics), but to all reality: I can’t make any sense of what the edifices themselves are supposed to be, or clothes, or utensils. Unlike for Bostrom, most of the time the one thing that does not become “glitchy” for me, does not begin to show signs of its simulated character, is nature. But nature loves to hide, as Heraclitus said, and to have it alone as the one thing that appears real, while suitable for isolated contemplation, is hardly sufficient to provide the experience of community that sustains a properly human life.

A third feature of this mature depression is the way it affects my moral character, no matter how much rhetoric is invested in the idea that it’s “just a disease” like any other. I have already described it is a “disease” that has dishonesty as one of its symptoms. Another symptom is that it makes a person —let’s be frank— a real jerk. In my own case I definitely discern a correlation between the occasional remission of feelings of depression, on the one hand, and my capacity for generosity or big-heartedness on the other. Eric Schwitzgebel has provocatively argued that if you are surrounded by fools, you’re probably a jerk. When I am depressed I tend to conclude from his argument, very much against the grain, that I must be a jerk, because everyone around me is definitely a fool. Schwitzgebel of course means to dispel the idea that others are really fools, by “reducing” their foolishness to a mere effect of the perceiver’s “jerkitude”. But depression militates in favor of a “Copernican revolution” in the new field of jerk theory.

Here is how the foolishness of humanity manifests itself. We have become familiar in the social-media era with the notion of “copypasta”, where people with no real thoughts of their own simply reproduce the language of others, and attempt to pass this off as political engagement, for example regarding the “problematic” character of Disney princesses. But in deep depression, every human utterance sounds like copypasta; everyone sounds as if they are simply channeling the language of others. Proust thus comes to seem a rare and loyal friend to the isolated depressive, when for example his narrator dissects the new phrases and idiosyncracies in the language of Albertine, to discern, in his own internal Académie Française, exactly who she has been seeing since she returned to Paris from Balbec at the end of summer. She thinks she’s just “being herself”, with all that language; he thinks she’s just delivering so much copypasta.

It is terrifying and alienating to apprehend all language in that way, and the easiest reaction is misanthropy. One is wrong, of course, morally wrong, to react in this way, and the Copernican revolution in this case cannot really succeed. It is, as Schwitzgebel claims, jerkitude that gives rise to the appearance of foolishness, and not foolishness that justifies jerkitude. But depression is a strange disease, and we will never be able to adequately deal with it if we pretend it’s just like diabetes or whatever. Depression makes you a jerk. One should not be a jerk. Ergo, if depression is a disease, it is a disease that it is morally wrong to have.

bruh

Though I don't feel particularly depressed (tbf I don't feel particularly not-depressed either; increasingly I don't feel particularly anything), this passage rings true to my current sense of the world.

This derealization surely has something to do with the very real historical process of dematerialization: institutions really are disintegrating as they shift to videoconferencing and e-mail as the primary channels of their endurance. What made universities real for some centuries, for example, were in large part their august edifices. These still exist, generally, but they seem increasingly disconnected from whatever it is we still pretend to be doing under the universitarian banner. Anxiety enables me to keep doing my work under this same banner, but I find myself unable to recall how I once accepted it all, unquestioningly, as real.

I'm not very good at holding things in my brain that are not in front of me, and so what's happening to my world seems sort of like a large-scale version of what happens when I open Spotify or go on Netflix instead of looking at a music collection or wandering through a video store; the huge range of possibility - people, places, friendships, activities - that I theoretically know is out there is almost entirely invisible and inaccessible to me. It's all abstract, hard to call to mind, easy to forget, because it's not there in front of me anymore. And so my world gets smaller and smaller as I cycle through the tiny set of options that are within my field of vision.

I feel like such an asshole when I "take stock" because both 2020 and 2021 have been pretty goddamn good years for me and my wife. The only person we personally know who's died of COVID is our landlord (bitter lol); I've been working steadily — in more or less the same field as table, though I'd really like to get some of that sweet medical editing ca$h instead of working on people's YA fantasy trilogies — and doing interesting personal stuff (wrote a book which is coming out in January, and had enough money to hire a publicist to promote it, so it might even sell). Work's slowing down a bit this month, so I'm setting up a big project, and of course I'm panicked that that's going to turn to shit somehow, but maybe it won't!

I turn 50 in almost exactly two weeks, and feel pretty good about that and pretty good in general — I've almost entirely given up eating meat and am noticing a lot of changes around that; I don't fall asleep immediately after meals anymore, and my blood sugar's going down. I have more ideas than I have time to devote to them (I'm working on a proposal for another book, and brainstorming a novel, and running a website/podcast/record label)... so, my sympathies to anyone who's having a tough time of it. I guess I'm just someone who was born to live this way.

2020 was the worst year of my life by quite a long shot, 2021 hasn't been a lot better tbh but nobody died yet so I suppose that's a win