by Molly Russo, LMFT

It’s been six weeks of sheltering in place and I find myself hungry for ways to understand this experience while also wanting to shut out the world. It’s an incredible difficulty to know what to do with ourselves or what we might need moment to moment. My friends and I have all shared photos of our various baking adventures (scones, English muffins, breads, pizza, cakes) with the implication that perhaps we should all be able to show something for our time indoors, proof to ourselves and others that we’re still functioning, that we can muster the thinking strength needed to decipher a recipe, that we can still be good little capitalists and meet open time with productivity.  

There’s a meme circulating the internet that goes something like this: “If you don’t come out of the quarantine with a new skill or new knowledge it wasn’t the time that you lacked, it was the discipline.” Some days it feels that all we can do is survive the day, survive the looming uncertainty, the economic destruction and the medical catastrophe that this virus and the inadequacies of our country leave in their wakes. The hyper-focus on capitalist productivity feels so uniquely American. We are so trained in feeling like our worth is measured in output and that if we only had more time, we could clock more hours. Even during a pandemic there remains pressure to keep going and keep ourselves away from knowing about our experience. 

A Lebanese trauma psychologist, Alaa Hijaz, expressed outrage on her Facebook page giving us context for what we are all living through. Here’s an excerpt: 

People are trying to survive poverty, fear, retriggering of trauma, retriggering of other mental health difficulties. This cultural obsession with [capitalistic] 'productivity' and always spending time in a 'productive,' 'fruitful' way is absolutely maddening. 

What we need is more self-compassion, more gentle acceptance of all the difficult emotions coming up for us now, more focus on gentle ways to soothe ourselves and our pain and the pain of loved ones around us, not a whipping by some random fucker making us feel worse about ourselves in the name of 'motivation.'" 

This time is so unpredictable perhaps it requires a radical acceptance of ourselves and our reactions. If days are spent lying on the floor because it feels solid against our bodies as we float in suspension then I don’t think we can say that was a “wasted” day. We are surviving trauma right now.  

Alternatively, one could argue that the ideas put forward by socialist utopians that productivity could be useful not for profit maximization but as a means to better ourselves and our communities could be at play. We are literally watching the gears of capitalism grind to a halt. What is this time but a chance to examine if we want to change systems. It could also simply be that we’re all very, very bored. There’s no right way to survive.