this day, last year, I entered into the first of many quarantines

we spiraled; desolation that I thought would last no more than six months evolved into the most bizarrely harrowing, traumatic year i’ve lived through, the lethality of which has felt continuously pushed aside

I was raised in post-9/11 USA, where the loss of 2,977 lives is still employed to justify the widest expansion of the surveillance state in history, trillions in military spending, on & on

social life was upended—much of it theater, but it was *acknowledged.* “never forget,” etc

yet. in the face of 527,000 of us dead here in the US alone, and millions more across the globe, we are somehow, incredibly, expected to simply continue on, with nothing. it’s taken me a while to collect my thoughts on this, but i’ve realized: it’s not resilience. it’s denial.

we are, each of us, currently experiencing lives within a culture of mass denial.

we have numbed ourselves to the idea of 527,000.

the result of an abject failure of basic governance—to provide for the needs of constituents facing death. So many evicted, abandoned, lost.

i mark today as one milestone within a structure of grief i will NEVER fully process or contain.

this day, waking—the sunrise—the afternoon—sunset—sleep—

is almost unremarkable in that its horrors are the same as yesterday, and the day before, and they wait for us tomorrow.

I am refusing to become desensitized to this perpetual loss. It has been one year. I mark this ground in my life. I won’t forget. 527,000 not meant to die. millions of others not meant to die. They were condemned. Deemed unworthy of the effort. I mark this. one year.

i don’t know what else to say. i want to empty my savings into my local food bank. i want to somehow force anyone with the power to do anything, to understand. i want to scream. one year.

i know this is another blip in the seemingly endless, distorted terrors of white supremacy. we’ve all got to do what we can. i don’t know what else to say.

i mean, this is where we are. https://twitter.com/UndoubtedlyABot/status/1370561912270913536

I’d like to end this thread with a fantastic comic that really touched my heart today, from @connjie. It explores this phenomenon of denial/“psychic numbness” that people experience during mass tragedies like the pandemic, and small steps to help abate it. https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/04/25/987208356/comic-how-i-cope-with-pandemic-numbness