Slowing down to heal after the year of the pandemic

I'M going to cheat a little this week and borrow some words from my 17-year-old daughter to start this column. I found this paragraph in an essay she has written as a requirement for a course she is applying for.

"I wrote about my grandmother, shortly after she had died, and I was not yet a teenager. Those words have kept her alive for me, storing small memories that I would not have been able to hold on to otherwise. It made me realise how powerful writing can be. How it holds precious things safely. When you can write something with vulnerability and truth, people resonate with it, and feel validated by it."

Every now and then, as we struggle to disentangle from complicated situations, something simple crosses our path and offers us a glimmer of hope. At a time when nothing seems to console, my daughter's words reminded me how much it is the small details that will finally save us, not the big, bold solutions we seek and never seem to be able to redeem.

One year ago, as the Covid-19 pandemic spread throughout the world and our governments reacted in panic, often being irrational and cruel in their response, our world changed too suddenly and drastically. As people, we are still reeling from the shock.

Our home and family spaces have been reorganised, unsettling us with new, confusing roles. Our workplaces have mutated into minefields where we struggle to maintain the fine balance between security and autonomy. Social and administrative structures designed to protect us seem to have turned against us. The uncertainty is manifold. Our livelihood, education, health and the safety of those who we care for — all of it has been at risk for a year. Our delusions that the pandemic will pass have been shattered by our own collective mismanagement. The world as we knew it may never be the same again.

Most of us have done everything we were required to keep functioning, but how many of us were able to make a place for grief? We are being called upon to meet the needs of others when our own have been neglected for too long, making us feel exhausted. Did we realise when we were at the end of our tether that we needed to slow down to heal? Many of us have never even considered giving ourselves this agency.

As we enter the second year after the beginning of the harsh lockdown, we need to pause and pat ourselves on our back for surviving. Resilience needs to be rewarded, not taken for granted. It wears out unless it is nurtured. We have kept our dependents safe, both physically and emotionally. Our efforts are admirable, but the process is tiresome. We need rest before we can be strong again.

At home we need to address the fault lines that are weighing us down. We may be afraid of speaking up because we are afraid of rocking the boat but allowing microaggressions to go unchecked means we are heading for a breakdown anyway. There is no point trying to keep up the faccedil;ade of normalcy when our realities are frayed. We owe it to our own mental health.

Just as I was concluding this column, our youngest daughter sent me a text message from her older sister's phone along with a photo.

"Hello Mamma this is Naseem and I wanted to tell you that I put flowers on Rahat's grave today."

Rahat is the name of our pet cat who died a month ago. When the grief first hit us, I wondered how our children would recover from the pain. Nothing I said seemed to console them. Every day without Rahat exhausted us.

We did not hurry ourselves towards recovery. We spoke of our love for him. We allowed each other to break down. Many of us have suffered unimaginable, intangible loss in the year that has gone by. We need to name it before we can let it go. Self-awareness will rescue us.

The nurturance that my daughter found in a school essay on her grandmother can be found by each one of us in our own personalised way. For her sister, it is tending to a beloved cat's grave. We all have the fire of creativity within us that will eventually make us cross every threshold of loss. We need to agree to acknowledge and honour it first.

Natasha Badhwar is a film-maker and author.

natasha.badhwar@gmail.com



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