“All the World’s a Stage.”
National Lockdown: Day 29
According to Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, there are five stages of grief- Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance. In South Africa there are currently eight stages of loadshedding, seven deadly sins (which Bheki Cele seems to be reading off), and now five stages of lockdown. South Africans are going to need a helluva App to deal with all of these stages (Pro Tip App Developers). Shit is about to get real. Again. Remember when we used to complain about water shedding and loadshedding? Fuck those were the good old days. What I wouldn’t give to go back to the threat of Day Zero. I remember thinking that was rock bottom. And I’ve said it before, my mum is right, “Things can ALWAYS get worse”.
- Denial:
You’ll notice I’ve been AWOL, MIA, “gone like a scone”. Over the past week or so, it dawned on me that I was hitting the ground running, and I hadn’t really stopped to “check-in” with myself. From the 14th March until just after the Easter weekend, I self-isolated and launched myself into work and was a one-woman writing machine. I was doing the positivity thing and it was working, but when I stopped working, I realised that I was kayaking down the ol’ river of Denial and it was choc-full of crocodiles and other hazards. Social media repulsed me, nothing was funny, the light went out, and the reality of how long this is going to be really started to take shape. I couldn’t write… because I was at Stage One of Grief, Stage Zero of loadshedding, and Stage Five of lockdown. And I knew that lockdown was going to continue for the forseable future, it wasn’t a surprise, but somehow I didn’t actually stare at it in the face. Denial has many shapes. It’s not always well-rounded.
I decided to shift my focus and not put pressure on my self-created need to document every single day. Some days and weeks are best forgotten. Some are best kept private. Some are so intimate that you want to keep them for the humans who are most special to you. But the guilt of not writing weighed heavily, and as more days passed the more I realised that I was in a slippery slope, and I got fucking angry with myself. In academia we have a mantra that we live by, ‘I should be writing’.
- Anger:
There is a lot to be angry about. I miss some people so much that I don’t know how I will survive until Level Two (lockdown level). I am angry at Bheki Cele for being an asshole with a vendetta and a hat game that is so strong it’s scented with musk ox. I am angry when I go onto social media and I see how stupid and petty people can be. I’m angry with people who argue with experts. I am angry with people who think that “they’re entitled to have their own opinion” when they’re informed by lunatics (Fun Fact: they’re not). But for a while I was most angry with myself. As the days ticked by and the writing dried up, I was fucking angry that I couldn’t write, that I didn’t want to write, and that I was just incapable of looking at a blank page. I focused on putting emojis on dogs, putting together lecture content, and thinking. Thinking inevitably leads to manipulation, and manipulation is all about convincing yourself to do things. “Hello Spiral my old friend”, the widening gyre is upon us.
- Bargaining:
“Jaqui… you can either hoovie (hoover/vacuum) or stare at a blank page…” (Fun Fact: this was a stalemate). It’s amazing how bargaining works when there is only self-accountability. It’s amazing how many things fall off the table when you give yourself two really shit-kak options. The more shit activities you give yourself, the less you do. This is why people eat cake. And, writing is my favourite thing in the world, until it’s not. And when it’s not fun, it’s abusive. The bargaining was making me feel shit because I was stuck, and I started to hate the thing that brings me the most pleasure. Writing is supposed to make me happy.
- Depression:
An identity crisis is something that I’m well versed in. I have many personalities and they’re not always easy to reconcile. Writing allows me to straddle the borders of my personalities, for good or for bad. Ivan Vladislavic says it perfectly in his masterpiece, The Distance,
‘Then again, my brother’s need to be someone else never goes away. He becomes a writer. You can see the catastrophe coming down the pike.’
(Vladislavic: 2019, 73)
The pen is a sword, sometimes you have to fall on your sword for your artlessness. And sometimes you need to be fucking sad.
- Acceptance:
Once I’d accepted that it was OK to feel like crap, and that no one else has any expectations of me (I’m hardly G.R.R. Fucking Martin- please finish your bloody book already!), I started to realise that I’m an idiot. This happens a lot. I don’t like to admit that I can be an idiot because it’s not good for my street cred. Anyway, I decided to do what my Emotional Support Animal (E.S.A) Bestie says, which is “focus on 1%”. My E.S.A picks up great advice, which is useful because I usually need it. Anyway, she reckons that the best way to live is to do everything 1% better than the previous day- so if you write 500 words on one day, write just a few more than that the next day. It applies to everything, and it’s been a game changer for me because I’m competitive and sometimes I want to push it to 10 or even 20%. Other days 1% is just fine.
So, I changed my focus, I handwrote letters, I photographed them, and I sent them to people I love. I’ll do more of this. I wrote lists, and I checked off things, which is satisfying as fuck. I accepted that lockdown has become a new set of stages, and that we’re not going anywhere. Our worlds are tiny, and sometimes there will be nothing to say, and that’s OK. Sometimes you won’t want to talk. Sometimes you’ll just want to listen. And sometimes you’ll want to scream into the fucking void. All the world’s a stage as we march towards the last scene of all… the scene that ends this strange eventful history*.
