I want to look at the question itself: What did I learn from quarantine life?
There’s a famous Bryant McGill quote that, “suffering is one of life’s great teachers.” But I don’t think it’s a kind teacher, nor a compassionate one. I think it’s the kind of teacher that barks orders, punishes fast, expects too much from its students. I think what makes suffering such a great teacher, is that it’s effective at making you retain information. However, I don’t think that we always learn the right lessons from our suffering, simply that we feel an overwhelming need to prevent this suffering in the future. Our minds come up with reasons for our suffering but those reasons might not have any basis in fact. Our brains may create coping mechanisms, but they might not be healthy for our long-term survival.
For those of you who don’t know who I am, I’m ASH. I’m a coward who hides behind an icon instead of showing their face. I’m scared of a lot of things, I try to please others because I don’t want confrontation, and I don’t know who I am. I think that these flaws, and many others, exist within me because of my childhood abuse. I was made to suffer and so I learned. I learned to associate common household objects with abuse. I learned to do what others want so they won’t focus their aggression towards me. I learned to never be certain with my beliefs because I was constantly told that those beliefs were wrong. These are lessons that might’ve helped me when I was young and under attack, but as an adult, they keep me from being happy and they keep me from being able to make connections. These are lessons that I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to unlearn.
Nice sob story. Boohoo who cares, right? I’m inclined to agree, but I feel like my suffering can help to explore this issue without things getting personal. I think there’s something deeper at the heart of the question: “what did you learn from quarantine?” And that’s the false assumption that suffering MUST be meaningful. Every horrible thing that happens to us has to have a reason, right? But why?
When bad things happen to us, we react, we cope, we recuperate, and then we evaluate; not necessarily in that order. When we evaluate our suffering, our brain is looking to prevent this horrible thing from happening again. If only I had checked my emails before walking out the door, I wouldn’t have gotten in that fender bender. If I had slowed down sooner, the car would’ve seen me. But this isn’t always true. Not all moments of suffering are preventable. It didn’t matter if I stopped playing with dinosaurs, or stopped reading about dinosaurs, or read about Greek Mythology, or studied mathematics. I was always going to be dumb and immature to my abuser. It was never about what I did, it was about them having power over me. There was no way for me to stop my abuse by changing my behavior. Similarly, sometimes you just get hit by another car.
There isn’t always a lesson to be learned from suffering. We want to believe that there’s some great lesson to learn so that it will never happen again. That impulse is strong and very human and I don’t want to shame people for having such a natural reaction, but we are not machines. We are capable of thinking about how we come to conclusions and why. When something bad happens, there isn’t always a way to stop it. I couldn’t stop my abuse because I never even knew to recognize it as abuse. With great introspection and understanding, we can recognize when we are powerless and fight the urge to jump to false conclusions that make us feel better about the future.
Moving into quarantine, I knew that I was troubled and flawed and weighed down by whatever undiagnosed mess the psychologists would call my mind. What I didn’t understand was how badly I had self-isolated before any of this began. My fear of socializing took my friends from me. It did it by degrees, convincing me that a phone call was too little, or that they were probably too busy to make time for me. Then my brain told me that I was a low-value friend and that all of my interactions with them were negative. Then it repackaged every conversation I ever had with them and turned it into a highlight reel of them being disgusted with me and them lying to feel good by taking pity on someone so repugnant. Six months before Quarantine started, I’d told my best friend that talking to them caused me anxiety and we stopped talking.
It took me a while to realize the truth of my situation. Much of my failings, my decreased memory, my mood, my appetite, were starting to be picked up by other people. Now that the world was in isolation, I started to see the true impact of isolation on the human mind. As bad as I was, my fears had only made things worse. The lessons of my suffering were only causing more suffering.
So I’m a mental wreck, who cares? Well, the thing about big events is that there aren’t easy answers. If a tornado hits your house while you were wearing a blue shirt, never wearing a blue shirt won’t protect you from tornadoes. So when buildings are hit by airplanes our minds aren’t okay with that. There has to be a reason! There must be something we can do to make sure a President is never shot again. That’s when conspiracy theories start. That’s when people believe that vaccines cause autism. COVID-19 will cause a flood of new conspiracy theories about how the youth, the left, the conservatives, the elderly, the government, or the corporations engineered a virus to kill hundreds of millions of lives. (I really hope we don’t match Spanish Flu numbers.) What’s important is that we don’t fall into that trap.
Suffering tries to force us to learn a lesson, but there’s never a guarantee that we’ll learn something useful. I think that on an individual level we can all learn a lot about ourselves during quarantine, but I don’t think that this pandemic should be the time to learn big lessons about the nature of the human mind or make sweeping generalizations about a group of people. I learned that I like kombucha, but only if it’s flavored rose or pomegranate. I learned that I have a lot of trouble working in the same room as my partner. I learned that hugging a stuffed parakeet can help me cope as an adult. I learned that I can’t live without friends even if having them is physically painful. I didn’t learn why COVID-19 has killed far more Americans than any other country.
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