Radical acceptance of grief
Most of us simply move on without mourning our loss. Meanwhile, the wound of loss still flares up. But no one seemingly wants to talk about it.
The light finally arises and illuminates the long haul of bleakness. From statistics and epidemiological predictions, the end of the pandemic is nowhere close to this current time. But the epilogue of this nightmare is awaiting rightly in the corner. Although the vaccine has only covered a tiny amount of the population, hardly significant to stimulate herd immunity, it has alleviated our fears to become less intense. Most importantly, it has awakened millions of hope risen from the uncertainty. The post-pandemic life seems more reachable than before.
The last fourteen months were definitely not an easy route to venture. But what occurs to me in this transition phase, most people seem sufficiently capable to reset the power button, then get back to their normal life seamlessly, without any ordeals.
Since the distribution of vaccines has started, it is rare to find conversation circulating in social media about grappling with anxiety in pandemic life or faring with limited social interaction. Some still linger, but not as plenty as in the first period of social distancing. People have adamantly moved on from this unfinished matter, whether or not they have been protected by the vaccine. Everything would probably safe as long as you cover your own breathing with a mask.
I am well aware, not everyone has the privilege to restrict their works or activities outside the house. But most of the case lately, when people are becoming negligent to the infection risk is more due to exhaustion rather than choice. This long overdue and continuous crisis has reshaped people to be indifferent to the hardship at the mass scale, moreover to be inured to their own suffering. In the lack of a better phrase, people try desensitizing themselves to the mental and physical cost caused by the acute stress, fear, and anxiety during the pandemic.
I believe not everyone is completely adjusted to this pandemic while the inclined number of cases, patients, and deaths had been worsening throughout the year. I cannot expect that everyone will involuntarily face up this situation with whole acceptance every single time. All of this has been too consuming, so it’s understandable if people choose not to keep fearmongering themselves to make the condition less exacerbating.
Regardless, what makes suffering worth enduring if we can shift our focus to engage in new hobbies, harshen the functional skill, and generate profit from it. At some points, it will be more productive to allocate our energy back for fighting in social media on a class-inequality commentary, scrutinizing harmless self-actualization insight, or canceling a self-absorbed influencer — often the dispute is only poisoning the public discourse or turns both sides to be equally pretentious trolls.
But there are people who haven’t toughen themselves out as easily as most people do. In one report, Phebe Tucker, a professor from Department of Psychiatry at University of Oklahoma conveyed COVID-19 survivors, people who were left by their family members or relatives due to the disease, healthcare workers, front-lined volunteers, or professionals who dealt with constant stressors during the crisis tend to experience post-traumatic symptoms ranging from mild to severe level. A meta-analysis study in 2017 publicized in Journal of Affective Disorders mentioned that 10 percent of bereaved people will develop prolonged grief that can persist for more than a year.
They would likely feel alienated while following the rush of societal desire that wants to pass over the pandemic vastly. For them, getting a vaccine obviously is not a similar experience with deleting all the awful memories throughout the pandemic, so they can start everything over and suddenly feel renewed. Even though things get brighten, some of us still find it’s hard to exhale the air of a brand new day.
Admittedly, I don’t think most people are completely free from such consequences either. From my experience being an adult, most of the time when we deal with stressors or traumatic experiences, we prefer to numb ourselves out from the pain instead of fixing our attention towards the source of the problem.
In this pandemic which has been a recurring state of lost opportunities, it is hard to not recognize that we frequently succumb to the “I can’t complain mentality”. We refuse to give ourselves permission to mourn. It is because we rank our loss in the lower suffering level compared to people who must spare with big traumas. But even losing a job, holding a business for a while, being isolated from your loved one, or being trapped in uncertainty for a long time are just some little traumas, the aftermath to disfranchise all of these losses will always create damage to us. In this sense, it must be very disquieting to feel that your suffering doesn’t have a place to recover.
Nothing about mourning feels normal to me. In the first three months of 2021, the remote survival mode has affected my sense of existence heavily. The limited social connection and the loss of physical, intimate presence of others seemed to extract my soul from my body and place it in a detached continent. I thought, I woefully edged on being expelled from this world. If the disease weren’t that detrimental to kill me, I worried my house would send me into the ditch of invisibility.
I might about to lose my sense of self, but it was not completely deteriorating. There were remaining parts that coaxed me to survive while myself still could not function at the full capacity. A day-to-day life seemed like a joyless and aimless ride. Days passed like blurry experiences as I lagged off throughout times as if my brain worked in constant turmoil.
Languishing is a word that can explain this sense of stagnation. A psychologist from Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, Adam Grant, says languishing can be related to the way our body responds to chronic stress derived from traumatic events. In the mental health spectrum, languishing is placed in the void between depression and flourishing — a state when you acknowledge yourself to be meaningful and driven by purpose. Languishing can be the reason why our body seem losing the function of resilience muscles. As the result, our senses become fatigued and unstimulated. In this state, you’re not depressed, but inarguably you’re struggling.
As my brain got foggy, I started to see a state of being alone as an imminent threat, that to live in my body was more about a question rather than a statement. This unreflective intimacy grew a feeling of alienation in the middle of the situation where people were so eager to return their life to normalcy, whereas the rate of vaccination did not even cover seventy percent of their neighborhood. I indeed felt to be uniquely unqualified to enter the post-pandemic life.
How can people move forward from this pandemic unperturbedly? Is it only me who has experienced this state of languishing? If I could borrow Olivia Rodrigo’s resentment towards her ex (in her third single good 4 u) as a rhetoric question, why (people seemed) so unaffected like a damn sociopath? I know it is not true, but why does the grief feel like an individual trauma rather than the collective one? In fact, we are facing what so-called a world-altering event together. It seems like everyone is just fending for themselves, desensitizing their own hardship, and disregarding others. So, while we love in common, we actually grieve alone?
Languishing also can implicate how people profess self-awareness, they can become less and less sensitive to what they actually experience, feel, and think. They are indifferent to their own struggle, they are not noticing that they are in the state of languishing. This could be the case as we tend to numb everything out and discount our own loss, our body is slowly replacing every single part of it with something artificial and mechanical. Some of us might have become an array of engines and gears. Eventually, it would overoptimize their resilience that let all the misfortunes they experienced in this crisis just fall back into the shadow, without allowing themselves to mourn, let alone validate their loss.
Lately — in the mid-June of 2021, the new surge reported to threaten us all, health care facilities in some cities is at risk of collapsing again. To alter the course of the surge, experts insist to apply more rigorous restrictions in physical distancing, and multiple times the government asserts individual responsibility as if they are unabashedly blaming the public for not being submissive to commit protocol prevention. Meanwhile, the government was the one who conveyed the ambivalent messages, encouraged the public whether to limit mobilization or visit tourism sights during the Eid celebration. The regulation was even eased to increase purchasing power in the prior month, without providing a strong basis of proof from sufficient contact tracings and testings data.
Every decision the government takes unmistakably will influence the public’s behavior. Now, the nation is tilting in the right direction to conquer the pandemic with vaccination, but the intention may imply a slightly different insight to the public. The reversed regulation can be perceived that the virus transmission has been under control by the continuous vaccination. That being said, people are conditioned to restore their life to normalcy, whereas the nation does not even reach the first quarter target for vaccination rate.
The government also cannot acquire constructive solutions for the public’s mental health problem, just imposing for individual resilience to be a bandage for systemic trauma. Nevertheless, resilience is only available for people who can access the resources of health information or health assistance. So, it’s not surprising if people are only caught out by their own plights because the government lets everyone survive alone, without proper advocacy.
But I do not want to succumb to the situation that prompts us to simply move on from this unresolved problem. I could not configure my sense of self-worth and started questioning the consequences of my existence at the moment, because I had lost so many milestones to maintain and solidify my relationship with friends, relatives, and peers during this pandemic. This matter colloquially was not as harrowing as all the misfortunes related to the big trauma, but all loss, regardless of how little the impact was, need to be routinely acknowledged and grieved.
I want to stop pretending that I seem have figured out all the things whilst most of the time I still cannot navigate my actual location on my life journey. I do not want to eliminate the disfranchised grief because having legitimacy to our own grief is not only important to reconcile ourselves with loss but also enable us to move on in the right way.
We cannot only mourn, we also need to hold ourselves accountable to proceed with all the things that occurred in the crisis, what things eventually made us here and where we project humankind in the future. So many lives were ended unjustly throughout this pandemic. It will be more terrifying if we just shift our minds state and neglect to fathom this tragedy in a reflective manner.
By allowing ourselves to grieve and understand the pandemic’s far-reaching effects, including to our psyche hemisphere, we can be more prepared. For what? For the long marathon of pandemics that we may still have to face upon as our country is scrambling to get more vaccine supplies.
We have no choice to be swarmed by exhaustion, but this suffering can be alleviated as long as we have each other backs. This pandemic is just too big for one person to carry alone. We should be on this struggle together, not individually, we need to restore all of this to become a collective fight again.
