Welcome to the Club
Under the gravitas of COVID-19, it’s fair to say we’re all experiencing a seismic shift in how our worlds turn. Immediate expectations, hopes, and plans have gone out the window. In their place are uncertainty, fear, and empty diaries in which we’ve carved ‘WHAT NOW?!’ until it’s embossed on every page for the foreseeable future. Simply put, we’re suffering.
Author and podcast creator Nora McInerny uses her backstory to talk openly about the difficult things in life. According to her, there’s a club for people who’ve been through something traumatic. It’s not exclusive, anyone can join and once in, a piece of you belongs to it forever. In fact, at some point or another, we all join. When shit hits the fan, tragedy strikes, or the world simply opens-up to swallow us whole; this is where we go. Initiation takes many forms: a lost loved one, redundancy, ill-health, anything that shakes the foundations of the house we’ve comfortably been living in. For many, COVID-19 is it.
Grief, the term many are using to describe their current experience, is undeniably communal and yet deeply personal. Nobody is exempt of grief, something those in the club know. Once inside, we understand that everybody is balancing on the tightrope of their own personal disaster, each vulnerable to a painful fall. Mine came in the form of depression and an eating disorder, conditions I used to think were reserved for people with less balance than me.
Having shattered the illusion of exclusivity when it comes to vulnerability, there’s a new obstacle to navigate. Comparison. While grief is a shared experience, in its throes we still feel alone, certain that no mortal - living nor dead - has felt our pain. To steer past this, McInerny highlights the clubs only rule: no comparisons. Like all rules, it’s subject to change and frequently broken.
Recently, I good-naturedly advised a loved one to have perspective over their anxiety about interrupted workflow during the pandemic: it could be worse. Granted, perspective is a valuable commodity. The death of a child isn’t comparable to the collapse of a business deal, being evicted isn’t the same as having to cancel your Netflix subscription. We each carry our own burdens, the weight of which is unknowable to others.
Being caught in whatever storm we find ourselves, is itself a perspective. Like all forms of weather, ours will change. But for now, the conditions are real. Asking someone to have perspective is another way of asking them to adopt ours. Akin to telling them it’s hot out when they’re freezing to death.
‘I’m sorry to hear work is tough. But hey, at least you can eat more than one meal a day without hyperventilating.’
Comparison leads to more pain, causing us to dismiss the experience of others or rush to fix their situation.
To fix is to pity. The need to fix signals a need to distance, often because we’re uncomfortable with the suffering of others. Pity is empathies trashy cousin; a response filled with shortcuts, supplements, and support group recommendations. Nobody wants pity, and the fear of it leads us to utter those immortal words, ‘I’m fine.’ What we need is to trust that exposing our weakness won’t lead to judgement. That the cracks on our path won’t be frantically filled-in or compared with the cavities of others. The upshot? Only when we sit with a person’s pain do we empathise with it.
The world is grieving in the wake of COVID-19. People are lonely and suffering because of it. But pain has always been lonely. Because even when people could sit with us, not everyone did. And of those that showed up physically, not all were available emotionally. People in the club are now seeing their loved ones experience how lonely it is to suffer, be it physically or emotionally. And as tempting as it is, instead of waving club cards in the faces of those we care about, we must hold ourselves to account. Rather than underscoring our struggle or highlighting our pain, we must make room for theirs.
The trauma people are currently experiencing is new to them, but trauma is not new. The same must be said for any pain or trauma any one of us might feel. Grief can feel isolating, when in fact it connects us all. No experience is infinite, and no feeling is final. As McInerny puts it; we are here now, we will not always be here.
But while we are, welcome to the club.