The generational anxiety of the C-word

Corona. Say it once. Say it in isolation. Say it without context. Say it without words we knew before 2020 supporting its grammatical existence. Say it to yourself. Say it enough. Enough to measure its thighs and waist. And arm lengths, and chest. Analyze how easy it sounds. How symmetric it is. A consonant and a vowel – three times over. Its simplicity is fascinating, the weight on its shoulders – staggering. It’s almost as if it came to defy a race of a future, the sole representative of a wild tribe of galaxy-wide rebels, in whose head the end of everything carries meaning. It doesn’t like death. It just couldn’t take us anymore. Its as if it was fed off on concepts of anti-human ethics like we imagine jihadis in training camps of secret terrorist organizations.

Except that it is none of it. It’s more human than most humans. Its imperfect, relentless, and dangerous. Some say it started off a bat-eating incident, some say it ‘leaked’ off a lab. It’s more myth than the dungeons and graveyards of mythology. You can’t see it, you can’t hear it, you can’t feel it. You can smell it though; something is up.

For the last month, I witnessed something I thought our generation would never in its lifespan: collective confusion. Ever since the numbers in China were made public, and Italy, Iran, flights, balconies, toilet paper, maggi and sanitizer became part of my daily life vocabulary, there was a lot to anticipate.  The needless beauty of it all is its equality. It hits my alcoholic neighbor, just as much as it hits Wayne Rooney, who is affected just as much as the wife of the President of Canada, who is medically prone just as much as a farmer in Greece, who is hit as much as me – who sits at a corner in his room writing this with a mood-swing for a heart. Well, theoretically. In reality, there are no vacant spaces in crematoriums in Bergamo, Italy. Army trucks are carrying the coffins out. Nurses are on 24-hour shifts. There is chaos. And ugliness. There is death. And weeping. There are empty streets. And talented balconies.

A continent and a half away,

suddenly there are no colleges. There are no schedules. You wake up every day to the count of people affected, analyzing how close the dust and thunder of an apocalypse is to you. Then you think about how it might never get to you. There is hope. There is tension. There is selfishness. You can do nothing about it. The war started when you were working late, or slept early, and no one told you. So you sit at home, scrolling through posts which make you stressed, memes which make you chuckle and judge the defense mechanisms of a generation, and with assignments which carry, for the first time, more meaning than the deadlines. Our great war is here. And in the most millennial thing to happen since the start of the millennium, our greatest disaster asks us to sit at home and think about it as it slowly walks towards us.

For the greatest part of my three years of college life, I have struggled in choosing. Such was the sudden exposure and freedom, I spent most nights deciding between a book, a movie, writing, football, gaming, you know the usual. I spent much of it introspecting, or talking to random people I met online. I had become so used to of stress in my life before all of this, I couldn’t let it go even in a life without deadlines or expectations. The more people I talked to, the more I realized it was more of a generational case. There’s a thin line between getting consumed by the larger than life aura of decision-making and existentialism. Every night, I decide which side of the line I will lay my head-on. My feet fall on the other automatically.

But the last month has been different. For the first time, all the larger than life concepts in my head are true. I am doing what I have always wanted to do: normal things with the extra twist of partially less stress. This doesn’t mean the impending danger is any less, it just means there is so. The very presence of this danger means I can (we can), for once, look back at our lives. For some moments and thoughts, December 2019 can be as far away as July 2015, or May 2007. Our mistakes can be ours, our achievements can be ours. We can weigh what we actually value. Do we really regret what we thought we did, or do we see the bigger picture? Was all that time we spent with someone really a waste, or the highlight of the terrible-at-box-office-but-critically-acclaimed-because-PaulThomasAnderson-directed-it that is your life. I ask you to do that, not just because it is a better thing to do than counting viruses across continents. I ask you to do that, because in all this helplessness, loneliness, and umm..cleanliness – not once was there hopelessness.

Three or four blog posts back (I refuse to count because it makes me look more of a regular writer), I talked about how ‘we are always growing’ is a myth. We grow when tragedy strikes. For the first time, a tragedy has struck the entire selfish world. Expecting everyone to grow up is the first trait of a toxic relationship. But notice when people will still wash their hands for twenty seconds, or probably takes scientists more seriously. One can only hope. “You should title this post Hope”. Shut up.

I wish I could tell everyone the secret recipe of navigating anxiety, laughter, stress, and life, during a time like this. There is no time like this. This is The Time. The eternal relevance of its individuality makes one want to think over everything. So no, I won’t tell you the trick, because everyone gets to make their own. Like you built that relationship. Like you talk to that teacher. Like you closed that door. When so many different lives come down to a similar conclusion, I can’t help but think of one of my favourite scenes from Band of Brothers – a series on a company of soldiers in WWII. We get introduced to the war through the protagonist – Capt Richard Winters. As his company gets past the first day of being in war, he takes a moment to acknowledge what they have all gotten through. He overlooks bomb-shelling tearing away the darkness of the night sky, like New Year’s eve. He stands, and narrates –

“That night, I took time to thank God for seeing me through that day of days and prayed I would make it through D plus 1. And if, somehow, I managed to get home again, I promised God and myself that I would find a quiet piece of land someplace and spend the rest of my life in peace.”

I had words when I started writing this, and have just emotions when I end. For the longest time, I thought they meant the same thing. It was one of those myths I knew I had to shatter one day. And for the many other such myths I have to break, promises I have to fake, lands I have to wake up on, and people I have yet to break hearts of, I now value the opportunity of getting to. See you on the other side.