Notes From Spring Plague: A Twitter Thread.
it's been almost exactly a month since Quarantine began here in Upstate NY. I've been very lucky, I've had constant access to food, water, electricity and daily outside physical exercise. Compared to the charnel house downstate

has become my county is fortunate at 456 cases and 8 deaths. I have 2 underlying health conditions that could cause significant complications. But locally at least the curve appears to be plateauing so as long as I am cautious i appear to be in no immediate physical danger.

However, I fear I and so many others will become irrevocably damaged by this moment of "Epic History." Last summer after what felt like a lifetime of false starts I began to understand the darkness that has accompanied me most of my life. Due to severe childhood trauma

And being born with a "sensitive termperment" I'm for lack of a better term a walking trauma case. I hate the term survivor because the verdict is still out. My sensitive nature has given me many gifts but in my childhood environment it was also an emotional death sentence.

My tortured family situation left a permanent physical mark. My sympathetic nervous system has been completely fucked since I was a toddler I'm always in a state of fight or flee, which creates a devastating emotional feedback loop that makes most relationships almost

Impossible. But I was determined to fit in as my family was to fit me in. I survived high school, college, a master's program a nd 2 1/2 years of a PhD program before I crashed. Survived being the key word, since I was 16, on any given day, suicidal thoughts were as natural

As breathing. When I crashed in 2007 i crashed hard. If I had financial and social resources and protections it might have been a different story. however I was the first in my working class family to graduate from college so I was on my own. I had to go on SS and medicaid

And spent the next 11 years living with various family members and having repeated hospitalization s some which involved ECT because without resources healthcare esp mental healthcare in this country is fucked, as you all know. Last year for the first time in almost decades I

Did not regret living. I still had very hard days but I was learning about myself and the world without being tortured as much by the inner car alarm that was my nervous system. I was working, being social, albeit with missteps, and even researching and writing again. Like I

Said I didn't dread life, as much, Then Covid -19 came, such a simple phrase but as with most phrases that attempt to summarize a historical moment it is so ill-equipped to adequately convey the human suffering and change that it signifies. For me it signifie s the return of

mine and Paul Simon's old Friend, darkness. Especially in the last week the symptoms have been getting stronger and stronger due to the social isolation. The intrusive thoughts , the constant fight or flight responses to little or no actual threats, the sleepless nights the self

Loathing that borders on emotional self-anhiliation. They return with the comforting and deadly familiarity of falling asleep in a howling blizzard. And yet I continue on. I know in the easier moments I'm not alone. With t he hilarity of a fairly dark O henry ending all it took

Was a world plague of biblical proportions to help me feel not completely alienated from humanity. What I've always struggle d for has now become a routine, daily worldwide struggle. The desire for simple guilt free human touch. The connection of a smile, the charm of the

Casual flirtation, the safety of holding a loved one in your arms in the still of the night. Unadulterated, free laughter. The sissisphsean success of one more hour of holding back tears and maintaining the facade of confidence. or rather the struggle is always there

Our society is just more honest in the moment but I doubt it will be a lasting honesty. It will either dissipate in self congratulation and renewed mindless, individual consumption in a frayed , manipulative and cruel system, or the system will break and we will have simple

Unalloyed barbarism. I don't have the confidence of a dialectical materialist catastrophe or the optimism of a Liberal eternal recurrent system. I take a little comfort in Walter Benjamin's theological materialism. That history does not progress as we generally understand

Progress, but rather it's an ongoing disaster or rather runaway train heading for a disastrous precipice and it's our responsibility to pull the emergency break. The instructions of the emergency break is what Benjamin called messianic time. The past record of moments

Where the cry of the victim is heard, remembered and answered, we recognize the commonality , tragedy and solidarity of our material existence and thus undreamt of possibilities become the very nature of the possible. It's not a confident or scientific ideology. But in my

Own stupid way it's the one way I can make sense of the disaster of human history. so if you've lasted with me this long on this thread I'm sure your thinking, are you fucking nuts? Not exactly a great platform for this Kind of writing. Well yes I agree on both counts Im to

A degree nuts and I'm not great with the cynical ingroup high school bullshit that comprises 75% of this hellsite. I m far too uncool, stupid, uncompetitive, not funny enough, naive and too much a social misfit of that twitter. But the other 25% has been impoBryant to me

Not the accounts but the funny, brilliant, difficult, struggling, hating, and living people behind them. On this Easter Vigil having no idea what our collective or individual destiny is I can practice my very imperfect vocation of Historian by bearing witness to

Our own terrible moment of messianic time. With love health and solidarity, Easter 2020