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akemiartivist

My Pandemic Experience

Updated: Feb 5

In the beginning it was playing DDR in my friends’ living room and making smoothies and talking about the surrealness of what was happening. What’s gonna happen next? We wondered, with absolutely no idea. And then the statistics and news reports started coming in and it was panic and total lockdown everywhere. My boyfriend and I stopped seeing each other and my nonprofit closed our physical centers and moved all of our meditation gatherings online. My roomie and I did our Zumba class on Zoom in our backyard and our friends played their DJ sets on Twitch while we danced in our living room by ourselves and laughed at the weirdness of it. I painted a mystic tiger painting for our band’s single release and all of our family and friends from around the world gathered for the Zoom launch celebration. 


I worked from my bed in my room cuz I didn’t have a desk set up and my coworker cried in our Zoom meeting because she hadn’t touched another human for three weeks. I cried too because it felt so strange, so off, to be relating together in this two-dimensional, pixelated way. We all worried that we’d have to let go of our centers and that we’d all get fired and I carried the anxiety around with me even after I closed my laptop at six PM. My boyfriend said he would only see me if I quarantined for a week first, and that not being possible due to my roommates’ jobs, our relationship became digitalized too. I cried more. 


And then we decided I’d go stay at a cabin in Big Bear for a week by myself, get tested, then stay at his place for a week, each month. So I did that, hauling a giant cooler of groceries in my Corolla as I drove up windy mountain roads. Continuing to work at my laptop, but with a stunning backdrop of majestic pine trees, so beautiful that the volunteers I was training thought it was a virtual background. I tried to be mindful of the bird calls and wind songs and enjoy the sunshine on my face as I stared down at my screen, trying to also pay attention to the teacher in our Zoom mindfulness facilitator training with forty other people whose existence was confined to a 2×2 in square tile. 


Then a police officer murdered George Floyd and the world watched him die. Nothing else to do, nothing to distract ourselves from the gut-wrenching reality of anti-Black racism. My roommate and I masked up and walked three blocks to a protest on Sunset and Vine, and my fear of getting Covid from being in close proximity to hundreds of people subsided as more powerful feelings grew in my heart – grief, and love. Awe for the young people carrying out peaceful actions, chanting in unison and lying down in the street. The national guard loomed over us with their military-grade weapons and, actually afraid, we scurried back to our abode. 


“What should we do to be more actively anti-racist?” white people at my nonprofit wondered and messy conversations ensued. A queer Black womxn left our facilitator training after one of the teachers blew up at her in our Zoom session, under enormous stress from work and family health scares. Grievances were raised and some confrontations happened and some didn’t. A renegade subset of us started to meet and examine all of the ways that whiteness has shaped how we teach and how we are together. We brought on consultants to help us heal and re-imagine our organization from a new foundation of equity. It was emotionally exhausting despite literally all of it happening through Zoom and emails. Maybe that added to the exhaustion. 


I shuffled back and forth between Big Bear and my boyfriend’s place and my place and my parents’ place. Negative test after negative test after negative test result arrived in my inbox. Even though the world stopped moving, I was never more mobile. A constant migrator, I tried to please everyone and lost touch with my own desires. I couldn’t feel my feelings and didn’t realize it. Somewhere in the mix I turned thirty. 


Finally, my roommates staged an intervention and told me some things: I needed to slow down, I needed to pay more attention to the physical space around me instead of being stuck in my head and on the computer screen. I needed to separate my spiritual practice and exploration from my work spaces. I needed to find the balance between being in a collective and being an individual, and I needed to spend more time by myself to do that. 


I sulked for a while and started writing in a diary, raging at them for telling me what to do and fearing that they hated me and that I was unloveable. Suddenly I started feeling my feelings a whole lot. I shut myself in my room and wrote about all my feelings. I decided to paint a giant tree on the wall of my room, so sick of staring at a huge empty white space day after day. I thought maybe they would like me more if they saw I was doing something useful in my solitude. 




One of my roommates came back from a solo trip and came into my room and told me he loved me exactly for who I was and we held hands and cried. I needed to hear that. 


My boyfriend, realizing the unsustainability of my Big Bear pilgrimage situation, decided to give up his safety measures. We marveled at the novelty of now getting to see each other whenever we wanted. And then as his fear of Covid faded to the backdrop of his consciousness, his insecurity about our relationship came to the forefront. I ended up promising I would give up my exploration of my newly-discovered bisexuality, that I would be completely monogamous. He felt way better and I felt confused. He asked me to promise I wouldn’t partake in entheogens to the point of losing control of my actions. I said yes and felt even more confused.


He was relieved and we carried on with normal-couple things like going on hikes and cooking dinners and watching Avatar and I found myself rushing through all of it. Impatient. Automated. More numb by the day. 


He had an intense confrontation with a close male friend of mine and the ensuing fall-out jolted me into realizing, shit. Things are not okay. I talked to a mutual friend and took off the next day of work and talked to more friends and cried a lot. I sat on my meditation cushion in my room and closed my eyes and breathed, in and out. 


I read Audre Lorde’s Uses of the Erotic. I read this paragraph: 

When we live outside ourselves, and by that I mean on external directives only rather than from our internal knowledge and needs, when we live away from those erotic guides from within ourselves, then our lives are limited by external and alien forms, and we conform to the needs of a structure that is not based on human need, let alone an individual’s. But when we begin to live from within outward, in touch with the power of the erotic within ourselves, and allowing that power to inform and illuminate our actions upon the world around us, then we begin to be responsible to ourselves in the deepest sense. For as we begin to recognize our deepest feelings, we begin to give up, of necessity, being satisfied with suffering and self-negation, and with the numbness which so often seems like their only alternative in our society. Our acts against oppression become integral with self, motivated and empowered from within.

I put my pen to paper and started writing: I have suppressed my sexuality all my life. From a super early age, internalizing that masturbation was something to hide and be ashamed of. And then learning to perform, to be pretty, for boys. To do sexual acts with them even if I didn’t want to. Internalizing homophobia in my conservative Orange County town. Eventually coming out as bisexual and feeling family backlash. And then starting a relationship with a guy I really genuinely liked and getting back a feeling of normalcy, of acceptance. Putting my desire to explore relationships with women on the back burner, and then locking them away in a dark closet and throwing the key away. 


I wrote all that down and then broke up with my boyfriend. We both cried a lot. I got home and took a shower and when I stepped back into my room, I felt completely different. 


Calm. Slower but surer. Grounded in my body and in my space. 


The past few months since then have been a beautiful, painful, freeing process of feeling and releasing emotions I hadn’t let myself feel for so long. Grief. Fear, a lot of it. Deep joy. Hysteria. Passion. I’ve been crying and laughing more than I ever have in my life, and singing and dancing. Writing music and poetry and painting and rebuilding friendships and starting new ones as I’ve gotten all Pfizer’d up. Oh, and I hooked up with a girl and it was fucking amazing.  


As the world starts to open back up, as we go back into restaurants and bars and concerts and traffic and offices, I feel like it’s important to reflect on wtf just happened to all of us. I know I am not the same person I was before the pandemic – none of us are. We’ve been through shit. We’ve had to look at ourselves. We’re forever changed. 

As we start to emerge from this weird alternate-dimension cocoon we’ve been in for over a year, we might ask: what newness are we bringing into this world, and how will society change as a result of how we’ve changed? 


Going back to before, to “normalcy”, isn’t an option. Normal wasn’t working. Normal was in fact deadly. As I start to reunite with family members and friends, I notice the things that are different for me – I’m a lot more aware of my internal states at any given moment. I excuse myself from a room to meditate for a few minutes if my body needs space to process whatever’s arising. I’m noticing the old thought patterns that come up – feeling insecure about my worth, craving affirmation from others, judgements and fears. 


I’m carrying a sense of wonder, awe and gratitude into all of these new interactions too. How amazing we get to hug each other. How incredible we can be so close. I don’t take them for granted and I hope I never will again. And the places! I marvel at the miracle of being at someone else’s apartment. Or really anywhere else that’s not my room haha. 


I’m also a lot more intentional about how I spend my time. I don’t ever want to attend a social gathering out of obligation rather than actual desire. I don’t want any more shallow, vapid interactions with people I don’t vibe with. I want to keep investing and deepening in the relationships that truly matter to me, the people I would make sacrifices to be with.


And I’m also realizing that the things I used to do a lot like shopping and going out to eat – the stuff I couldn’t do during the pandemic – those activities were labeled as “non-essential” for a reason. I don’t need to do them to be happy. In fact, a lot of it actually distracts me from what I really want to be doing – creating art and growing as a person and building community (although the occasional restaurant is soo nice haha – and I am TRULY missing raves tho I would classify that as a spiritual need lol).


This pandemic wasn’t easy for anyone and we all deserve to celebrate ourselves for whatever it was we each went through. It’s my hope that we give ourselves lots of self-love and compassion, and space and time to feel our feelings and discover what it is we truly desire in each moment. I really believe that bringing this love and awareness into our interactions and friendships and gatherings will transform our collective spaces. Our families, and our workplaces, and our politics, and maybe even the whole world.

<3 <3 <3

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