I think we might have unthinkingly equated “lifting the lockdown” with “returning to normal”. They’re not the same things and I think we have to accept they’re not the same before we can really consider what a post-lockdown world can look like.

It’s understandable that we want to go back to what we know because this seems like the quickest and easiest way of erasing what has just happened.

The problem with this is not only that the pre lockdown world may very well not be coming back, it’s also that the pre lockdown world was a very big part of the problem.

Inequality has greatly contributed to the death rate, for example, as has pollution. The world we’d made fundamentally wasn’t working for a majority of people. If simply resurrect it, it will continue not to work.

Something I notice about so many of the coping strategies and advice circulating about how to deal with this time we’re in is that they’re very much focused on staying positive, focusing on things that make us happy etc.

I totally understand that - it’s important and there’s a place for it. But I think if we’re not able to really look this situation in the face, really confront the flaws in the world we’ve made, really accept what’s been lost, we won’t actually be able to effectively move on.

I don’t think this grief stage has been discussed enough. I think in desperately wanting to stay positive and go back to what we know we’re evading the work that needs to be done at both a personal and a structural level.

I honestly think we need to hold it together a bit less. I think we need to lose it a bit because that will be the first sign that we’re really genuinely reckoning with what has happened.

The only way that’s going to be possible is if we not only allow ourselves to go there, but also if we allow others to go there too. We’ve actually got to have a collective breakdown, otherwise all we’re constructing is this vast project of repression.

That’s not a good basis for whatever comes next because we won’t be able to look at the world honestly and empathically and wrestle with whatever it is that fundamentally isn’t working.

Art, grief, rage, and optimism. That’s what we need. And of course the value of the first is that it can hold all of the rest.