What a strange way to meet in a pandemic
Mél Hogan
Keywords: disability accommodation, Zoom meetings, pandemic denial, neoliberal university
Categories: Sick/Disabled Bodyminds during Sick/Disabling Times; Academic Pressures (or Critiques of Neoliberal Horseshit Productivity Expectations, as suggested by Amy Vidali)
I’m reading a self-help book and yawning. Yawning over and over again seems to be this thing I do now—a tic to add to the list of strange and shifting symptoms. For days, I couldn't fully inhale. The struggle to breathe was so intense, I thought I would dislocate my jaw. I stole puffs from JJ’s expired Ventolin—sprayed it right into my mouth, which you’re apparently not supposed to do. I tasted the propellants for days. I still taste them, but I can breathe.
For everyone, everywhere, this year has been about breath. The threat of losing it. Mine’s been about that, too, and vibrations in my core that were so intense that I thought the whole planet was sobbing together. Tremors. New to me, maybe, but familiar to many sufferers. Now I can relate, and soften.
A year flat on my back, I listened to hundreds of hours of wellness podcasts that told me that feeling good was simple: cold showers, sun, red light therapy, friends, stretching, meditating, humming, forgiveness, organ meats, breathwork, laughing, intermittent fasts, sleep—these would fix me. But contrary to the claims of Internet gurus, I gave up, gave in, and told myself that all symptoms were just as likely working some magic over me. Laying still for so long made me hyper aware of the way things move on, regardless.
A year flat on my back, I thought about how everyone around me wasn’t faring much better. Academics have ways of normalizing our anguish and passing it down, as collaboration or mentorship. Power as transfer of hurt. I think about the people charged with taking on their departments, their institutions, their governments—so that these can be better spaces. We do it as a matter of survival but hurt ourselves irreparably in the process. We break ourselves and each other. I ask myself how I can train my grad students to be successful enough to get jobs but not too successful as to be punished for it. I think this: academia made me lose breath and balance.
As I resurface, I am confronted by what the year has done to me, like many, by way of Zoom. What a strange way to meet yourself again, older now, more beaten down.
We accommodate the pandemic on Zoom. Much of our time is spent gazing in the Zoom mirror at our own hair, drooping jaw lines, and tired eyes. Some trick us with ring lights, while the rest reveal a struggle – in our faces, bad postures, and makeshift home offices. Some show up in crisp shirts, seemingly eager to get to work. More in hoodies or old cardigans. There are exquisite backgrounds, rooms airy and lit. There are cluttered backgrounds, spaces designed to hide from other people. There are people who have stopped pretending, and call in from their couch. There are fake backgrounds, too—bookshelves, mountain ranges, outer space. There are animal visits. And there are those who show up with video off and muted mics.
I have learned so much from my colleagues by peering into these two-way mirrors, looking at them, looking at themselves, looking at me, looking at myself. There is something about the grid, too, a structure of stacked heads—a forced togetherness and order. What a strange way to meet in a pandemic. Nobody can tell I’m not well, that I couldn’t stand up for months, that I struggled to breathe. Our pain is neutralized, out of frame. I do not know my colleagues’ struggles, either.
What are we looking for when we look at each other like this? So much is happening in these gatherings. Do we use work as an excuse to gather? Then we are tired because we work too much. Nobody is piecing it together. The isolation.
I like to imagine what we’d have done without Zoom, without the internet. Maybe we would have been forced to take a year off. Completely. Stall the world. But Zoom is here, and it exposes us and our willingness to keep playing along. I’m not sure it’s Zoom, or Zoom alone, that’s driving us. The compulsion comes from somewhere else. The idea that work is the thing to be preserved, at all costs. We know our working and living conditions will become worse in the years to come. And we’ve shown that we will adapt, and continue, no matter what.
I live in a province that pretends the pandemic isn’t happening, and the people visible from my window—at the bar across the street, maskless in stores–downplay or deny the virus’s effects. It’s their world. They deny the vulnerabilities and fragilities of the body, theirs, but mostly others’. They do not yet know what can happen. How sudden it can be. How terrifying and lonely it can feel. They live in a reality distant from my own, though I ride the pandemic working from home, with nowhere to go, nothing to do, no animal or person to care for. Funny that that is the jackpot in 2021, the object of privilege and disdain.
As my body repairs itself, I also think how strange it is to be mysteriously ill, with so many symptoms of Long COVID, but not in fact having COVID, not knowingly anyway. The timeline doesn’t add up. This is true for many of my friends, too—long sick, no one knows what with. I wonder if we will ever know. I also know it doesn’t matter. In the end, I think how much of what we feel is bound by breath; to “take a breath” means to inhale/exhale, but it also really means to pause, to find inward calm. Just like we sigh of relief and blow off steam—the breath is what tempers the whole world. I’m not holding mine.
**As I revise this text written a year ago, shockingly little resonates now with how the pandemic felt then. When this is published in the summer of 2022, I will be glad to have this document to look back on, to remember all of this, alongside the other pieces in this special issue.
Bio
Mél Hogan is Director of the Environmental Media Lab (EML) and Associate Professor of Communication, Media and Film, University of Calgary (Canada). Her research focuses on data centers, death in the cloud, and genomic media – each understood from within the contexts of planetary catastrophe and collective anxieties about the future. http://melhogan.com. Twitter: @mel_hogan.