It Was Always the World That Was Broken, Not Us

Why those with trauma histories and anxiety are coping better during the pandemic

A therapist friend reports that her clients with trauma histories and anxiety are coping better than most. For the first time in their lives they feel normal. Stripped of denial, the world catches up to those of us who live in a constant state of anxiety and dread. No longer pathological, our fears are rendered terribly real.

The world is in mourning. Each night reports are given on that day’s toll. At first just a handful. Then 20. 45. 90. And now, as I write this, almost 3,000 in my city. A 9/11 in slow motion — the fragments suspended in air.

We are used to dying alone, our pain invisible. But now the world watches. In the news cycle, with its demand for stories and narratives — something to connect with in the nameless numbers and the line graphs with their curves and peaks — we are suddenly seen.

In the online world we all now inhabit, memes circulate assuring us that we can’t be expected to be productive in a pandemic. Trauma, we are told, slows our synapses. Everything feels harder, slower, heavier. Don’t fight it, we are told. It is okay to crawl in bed and binge Netflix. It is enough to survive.

Years of moving against the weight of unacknowledged grief, lifting our feet from poured cement as it fights to settle and hold us, have come to an end. Permission. We have been given permission. Unshed tears, vaporized by the heat of our bodies, have accumulated in storm clouds that follow us. Now we can let them fall around us — a rain that feels strangely like comfort.

We have been told a lie. For years, we have looked inside ourselves for the coping mechanisms that would connect us to the world of the well. We have left a trail of apologies for our failures. But it was never us. It was the world that was unwell. And now it knows.

We are not broken. The world is broken.

Expectations fall away. Illusions that fueled those first weeks indoors give way to a collective lowering of standards. The rule makers and managers may continue to demand business as usual. But each day, more refuse.

Essential workers walk out, sick out and slow down. Those high-stakes tests they use to rank us and sort us and label us deficient are cancelled. Teachers adjust assignments and then adjust again. Parents decide the battles are no longer worth it. They struggle to remember why they entered the field in the first place and who ordered them there.

And in that space, those of us who always stumbled trying to keep the pace, we rise. Freed from failure, we stretch out our hands to touch the edges of possibility. We build and create. We become the ambassadors to this land that appears so unfamiliar to its newcomers.

It is a strange kind of affirmation we can offer:

Yes, what you are feeling is true. Everything is not okay. No, it is not better to look away. Yes, what you now see was always there. No, there is no safe shore to return to.

No, it didn’t have to be this way. Yes, it doesn’t have to be this way.

We have discovered what is essential. Food. Shelter. Caring for our children, our elders, our sick and our vulnerable. The ability to touch and hold and love one another. The feel of the air on our skin.

And we have seen what was made invisible before — the people without whom these are impossible. The EMTs. The nurses and the doctors. The nurses’ aides. The home healthcare workers. The grocery and pharmacy workers. The restaurant workers and those who deliver it. The cleaners and the laundry workers. The farmworkers who pick the produce in the fields and the truckers who carry it to the cities. The teachers and the paraprofessionals. The transit workers. The warehouse workers and the package handlers. Those, paid and unpaid, who take care of the children and the elderly.

The virus is brutal and discriminate. It finds that which sustains us and consumes it like fire in the presence of oxygen. And so what is most essential is most at risk. Only through this terrible knowing can we protect it and each other.

We have not even had time to bury our dead, but here they are — the rulers of this broken world — demanding that we return to our previous state of unknowing. They will feed us to that fire if we let them.

We must refuse. We must shelter and nurture the seeds that this whirlwind has sown. We must protect that is which is most essential. Through our fears and our horror, we must find our way together through the wreckage that has revealed these truths. We have lost too many. But we have this: we are understood. We understand.

We are no longer alone.