My hair’s getting so long I’d officially call it shaggy. It’s so long in fact that Cathy talks about putting it into braids with increasing frequency. She even tested it the other day. Not quite there yet but I’ll no doubt know when it is!
Not that I really mind the teasing. Hair grows, that’s what it does. It’s never been at the top of my priority list of things to worry about, even in the before-times. But there was a brief period there when I actually started getting it cut semi regularly. That’s a telling indicator that life was almost fully stable – routine haircuts? Unheard of!
Then the pandemic happened. Haircuts, like everything else, basically stopped. I’ve had two, maybe three, kitchen cuts done in the last two years. I’ve already talked about picking up my own cheap electric razor and doing it myself, though you know what “talking about” something means: it means you’ll walk around for months with that idea occasionally in your head and not enough urgency to actually precipitate action. We’ve all been there.
The point of rambling about shaggy hair is that the friend who used to raze me lives with her partner in their own home and throughout most of the pandemic it always seemed dumb to risk exposure to either their group or mine. Since hair never used to perturb me too much under “normal” circumstances, now the potential benefit of freeing my lavish locks doesn’t even register.
Here in March 2022 (St Patrick’s Day, actually. Happy St Patty’s), we occupy a liminal period. Epidemiologists say that COVID-19 is now beginning to subside. Again. For the fifth or sixth time. Coming down off of the historical (even for COVID) Omicron wave, there’s hope that this could be it. Certainly governments worldwide are flinging open the doors to social gatherings and travel as if the whole pandemic were ten years behind us. Unsurprisingly this is an opportunity Alberta’s leadership in particular are all too eager to get down on hands and knees to lap up with uninhibited haste. Again. But I neither need nor want to get into politics. The last two years only magnified political tensions between an already polarized society and I’m so sick of the endless looping discussions over fault, conspiracy theories and pre-existing prejudices drawn like poison to the surface. I can’t deny that some factions of this ridiculous game are more culpable in prolonging the pandemic than others but suffice it to say that, as a civilization, humanity’s done a piss poor job of controlling an utterly controllable virus. We’re social animals to begin with, stress makes us really stupid and we’re also lazy. In short, I know the virus will never go away and we have to open things back up at some point, we just always do it too early, hence five waves and counting. Therefore you might understand if I’m a bit skeptical that this is the actual end. Like everyone else I’d sure like that to be the case – I’ll just believe it when I finally, at long last, see it.
So here we are in this liminal period, a place we’ve been several times already. It reminds me how fractal the universe is because I see parallels to one’s individual mental health. I’m no stranger to depression and anxiety; sometimes I think I’ve encountered every possible flavour of feeling bad. Then I laugh at myself for such conceit of course because that’s preposterous – there are infinite ways to feel bad. But the intimate familiarity I’ve developed with a mind bending painfully into itself suggests a fascinating analogue to our collective experience with COVID. After long enough under the surface of a really bad, really extended mental health episode your perception starts to distort from the pressure. Once in a while, you might have a “good day”, a short reprieve during which that strained perception springs back wildly. The lessening of pain feels so good. In truth I think it’s the best feeling in the world. We’re collectively in one of those moments right now.
The way individuals respond to the release of pressure from pandemic mirrors the way individuals respond to release from feeling like mental health garbage with two-week-old cat litter on top and six-month-old egg salad sandwiches mixed in: radically differently. Some emerge warily, as if from a fallout shelter, personal radiation detector in hand and vigilant for more missiles on the way. Others act like it’s mardi gras. While I identify more closely with the former – accepting that things could go straight back to hell at any time and preferring to remain equipped – I imagine the same awareness inspires both behavioral extremes. One just hyper focuses on trauma while the other actively blocks it out and runs desperately away. This mix of trauma responses is what will keep us in-between crisis and normalcy for a long time to come. It’s not going to feel totally normal for a while.
If shaggy hair’s my only outward reflection of the current pandemic then I’ll gladly take that. Due to misjudgment, strategic myopia and laziness, we all continue to miss out on things we’d rather be doing in life, ignoring months of forest for two years of trees. There’s more to mourn than a few haircuts. Still, I continue to hope that this time I’ll be wrong – that the sluggish rate of vaccinations has, maybe, caught up enough to offset the critical mass of daily infections. Some superstitious fans grow playoff beards in a bid to avoid jinxing their respective hockey team’s performance with any change. It may seem like a drastic distortion of perception, almost akin to a mental health episode. But I know what that can be like, grasping for some kind of control via butterfly effect, lost for substantial recourse or solid ground. Perhaps I’ll just keep growing my hair until infections drop to a mere trickle and the healthcare system is safely through its own playoffs. I may end up with braids after all.
There's No Going Back 