Broken Rainbows: On What Comes After The Pandemic
The day before I started social distancing, I sat in the dim light of my CEOs office and watched a rainbow dance across his doorway. I was one of the last ones left in the office, dreading the idea of leaving. I knew what I was going to be facing — long grocery store lines, panicked neighbors, and the idea of being inside the house for days on end. The panic was building in my stomach all day, so when I turned around mid-afternoon and saw the rainbow, I was grateful for the break.
If you’re anything like me, you thought this would be brief. A few days of working from home and staying inside, a few extra days to read, and then back to normal. Back to the every day of never feeling like I had enough time to do all the things I wanted and that I was always running to catch up. Instead, I’m 14 days into more time than I know what to do with, too many episodes of whatever television I can find, and a deep gnawing feeling that things will never be the same.
I know I’m privileged to be working from home, or even working at all. I don’t have to worry about paying my rent or making ends meet, at least, not any more than I did two weeks ago and I know that if I contract this virus, I have health insurance to at least ensure I get treatment. My privilege both allows me to not have to worry about the life basics and over obsess about the things I still can’t control about this. It’s your quintessential lower middle class white girl problem, but here we are.
There have been dozens of articles about how to deal with what’s happening. I don’t just mean the physical health aspects, of course, but the mental ones. There have been articles about how to handle the grief of this, how to connect with people even when physically apart from them, and how to spend your time. I’ve read them all.
The thing I’m struggling with most, though, is what comes next. Whenever this ends, then what? The world we existed in won’t be the same. It can’t be.
One of my housemates keeps joking about us living in a “Last Man on Earth” scenario in the near future. It’s a coping mechanism for him, a way to process what’s happening. I can’t even get there. I can’t imagine what next month looks like, much less a few months or even a year from now. Planning for the future feels grossly inappropriate when as a country and a world we can barely get through the day.
My heart aches for the sense of control I once had, the feeling somewhere in my stomach that told me I was going to be okay. That we were going to be okay. It was a feeling deeply steeped in privilege, and yet it’s also one I’m no longer sure how to function without. I believed in a future where no one lived in poverty, where women and people of color ran our country, and where we began to finally see the world support the people who continually got left behind — the poor and the downtrodden, the ones so many people in our country pretend don’t exist. Some people think this will open the doors for those people to be seen differently. I worry we’ll drop plywood over the ever growing sinkhole and let them fall in when it suits us. We’ve done it before.
If you’re already planning for the future, I envy you. Wherever that strength in you is coming from, hold on to it. We’ll need you as we move forward, to guide the rest of us. We need to think about how our workforce changes, how education changes, and how we love and support each other differently. The cadence of life that might have felt easy before won’t flow the same anymore. Everything coming is new, even if you don’t think it is yet.
I keep coming back to that rainbow. As it moved across the doorway, it started to split, one half landing on the wall behind it. As it moved it changed, and the gap between the door and the wall created two different rainbows — one crisp and bright against the oak door and the other wobbly and dim against the wall. When the motion sensor light came on, the rainbows vanished beneath the fluorescents. I can’t decide where we are now, but we’re somewhere between disappearing when the light turns on and settling in the dark gap behind the doorway. What I do know is that when we take a step back and turn off the light, the wobbly and dim rainbow will come back again, moving us into whatever the hell comes next.
