11 June 2022

Trying to summarize COVID in few words, in response to a class project.

I’m assisting my professor with teaching a typography course this summer and the students were asked to choose and design a word�"any word�"that describes how COVID has been for them. The students are in Shanghai, China, so it’s obviously a very different situation from what we’ve been through in the States; in fact, they’ve only just been released from a two-month lockdown period after a spike in COVID cases across the country. And that’s lockdown in the most literal sense�"they couldn’t leave their homes, by order of, and enforced heavily by, the Chinese government.

People ask “what was COVID like for you,” as if we’re still talking about the very first quarantine period in springish-summerish of 2020, which I suppose is what comes to mind when I hear that question, as is the case with most people. “What was COVID like for you,” and it’s the verb was that’s so damning and so almost-funny. Funny-strange, like getting a whiff of something too saccharine that makes your stomach churn. Because there’s been no real end to COVID, just stages. It’s not over, it’s not over yet�"and you just want to scream because suddenly you’re the only one wearing a mask in the Meijer checkout line while a friend’s grandparent just passed from COVID.

Exit scene.

People ask “what was COVID like for you,” but really they’re asking what it was like at its most stifling, at its most oppressive. And then for my students, they're tasked with reducing that experience down to a single word in English and Chinese. It got me thinking about how I would approach the same project, cause�"s**t, what would I even choose? How do you condense two odd years of your life into one word?

It reminds me of when people asked me how high school was after I graduated. Like, in general? It was fine, I guess? Good. Bad. Life-changing. The most damaging four years of my life. The best I’ve ever performed and the lowest I’ve ever been and will probably ever be. COVID was similar in some ways, I suppose, but the difference is I can drive now and buy my own NyQuil and wear shorts in public without feeling like I’m about to f*****g die. 

Thinking about it deeper, I actually did a project just last fall about the year of 2020 with icons that summarized each month and featured a quirky little gender-neutral mannequin figure, splayed across the page twelve ways and experiencing what is damn near the whole range of human emotion. The title I gave to the project is “Boxes, Frames” because at the time I summarized my 2020 as feeling trapped.

I don’t know that I would describe the last two years as trapping, though. I’m sitting in my own beautiful apartment typing this out right now, far away from my parents. I have a car�"granted, my mother’s, and only for the summer�"and I can go out to the grocery store and buy whatever I want, any time of day (and I have. I bought myself a cake the other day�"it’s not good cake, but it’s one I bought for myself just because I could do it and not have anyone question me about it. It is not good cake. I pretend that it is). I have worked my a*s off and made more moves in my industry than I could have ever anticipated. I am more free and happier than I have been in my life.

Would I describe COVID with the word “free” or “freedom,” though? I certainly didn’t feel free in March of 2020 when I was sobbing on the drive down to my campus to move out of my dorm room. I didn’t feel free when I went back to my parents’ house for Thanksgiving and then didn’t leave until mid-January. I didn’t feel free when I looked at my closet and saw a fanciful spread of ill-fitting men’s jeans and Marvel teeshirts and battered white shoes with the soles half worn off.

But freedom is a consequence�"a result�"of what I went through during COVID, and over the last two years. I have freedom now, I suppose, because of what I learned and acknowledged and developed from being trapped beforehand. That’s the paradox of trying to use a single word to describe the pandemic experience�"is that no one word has the nuance it demands. “Nuance” might, but it's a big boring, that.

And what of the time in-between? Where I wasn’t quite trapped and wasn’t really free, what could I possibly describe that as? Maybe there is nothing at all that could. I can live with that.