today i’m thinking a lot about the ways that quarantine and lockdown have shifted from immediate panic and urgency to a claustrophobic, durational trauma. the public imagination can endure a single event, but the overwhelming passage of time is just unfathomable

disrupting normative time has always been devastating for those who can’t take part — people generally like to do and accomplish things at pace with peers, or social groups, or whatever — and now it’s like a blanket of normative time disruption has descended on the U.S

my work is deeply rooted in the queer/LGBT+ experience, which has always been affected by non-normative time: delayed adolescences and childhoods, fast-tracked intimacies, complicated families/chosen families, a social history heavy with trauma, etc.

my personal experiences are informed by durational trauma: childhood and family trauma and the transnational/institutional/bureaucratic violence of borders. the bread-and-butter of both is a lasting sense of being disjointed and out-of-time.

non-normative time will fuck you up. it just will. it is so much bigger and harder to grapple with that a singular event that you can point to and say, “that’s what messed me up”

and so, all of this to say: it’s not surprising that the people i see calling for lockdown to be OVER are those who are likely experiencing a significant disruption to normative time for the first time. they are white, they want their monthly haircuts, birthday parties, & agency.

this is a national trauma, no doubt about that, and it is the kind that the majority of americans are not used to. it’s one of prolonged grief marked with sharp points of devastating loss.

then there are those for whom “endurance” comes second nature, and this will not comfort them. the american response, (and, i think, the british response) reinforces the fact that endurance is an alien subject relegated to othered people but is not “normal.”

endurance is hard work but it is not “hard work” and it is tiresome but it is not fuelled by elbow grease. it’s hard for folks who think you can “work hard” and win merit to understand what endurance like that means.

anyway, this thread kind of got away from me but here’s the takeaway:
- the durational trauma of endurance is real and it is happening to all of us when it used to just happen to some of us
- trauma and grief are hard, no matter when they happens or what your past experiences are

your life will be long and there will be something good for you in it