Untitled (Coronavirus 2)

I still have my ups and downs, although I felt a little better today. But high? Far from it. I have my lows and my mid-lows, but no highs. At least today I didn't feel the need to sit by the river and cry. And I've been able to concentrate enough to read a few chapters of a queer novel. High only compared to low. And meeting a comrade on the street and not being able to hug caused me another low, in fact, recalling this back home I was on the verge of crying. Not high. Although emotionally better, I spent most of the day in my room doing little more than listening to music.

I feel helpless in the face of the situation. And I'm not talking about the Corona, which I don't really care about. If it touches me, it touches me, but it doesn't scare me. I don't understand the state of generalised panic. I don't share it. It's like living in a parallel world. By this I don't mean there isn't a public health crisis. That there is no action to be taken. Although I don't follow the rules of the State of Alarm Act, I don't skip over everything either. With a flatmate with symptoms, I do respect social distancing out of self-responsibility. But to go out in alone, to sit by the river alone, where is the risk for whom?

I feel powerless in the face of widespread panic. More than 100,000 fines in 9 days. Militarization. The repressive state. And no one questions it. War language. A war against a virus (pathetic!). Either you stay at home as the law decrees, or you are an ally of the virus. The construction of the enemy. People abuse from their balconies people who go out on the street with permission. It scares me, and I feel helpless.

I'm going back to my teenage years. The impotence of my situation at that time, living in a toxic family, already quite traumatized from my childhood in the same family. A family that didn't understand me, nor did they try. I was trapped in this family, in this place. Powerless. My escape was my dreams. My books. The vision of a better life. The music. In the face of the torture of my life in reality I was building my own parallel world, my better world.

Now I am trying the same (not consciously). With the impotence in front of the current situation of a generalized panic I try to run away from reality again. In the music. In the books. But what worked for me in my adolescence doesn't work for me anymore. Before I was completely disconnected from my emotions. I didn't feel the shit of my reality. I put off suffering until later (much later - the reconnection with my emotions has been very painful). And I would escape into my parallel world. Now it doesn't work for me anymore. The emotions are here. And I am not allowed to escape. They keep me in reality, feeling powerless, desperate, disempowered.

All this happens to me at crucial times. Crucial times in a struggle between life and the destruction of our planet by a system of a productivist and cisheteropatriarchal capitalism. We advanced before this widespread panic. But now what? This crisis is undoing our advances, and with it the little chance that life would win. It scares me. The climate anxiety is returning strongly to me. Very strongly.

They tell me I should focus on today, not tomorrow. Shit! In this state of generalised panic I can no longer do today what might make possible a tomorrow worth living (not just me, us). And time is running out. We are on our way to more than 3°C, which would probably exceed several tipping points and trigger even more global warming: 4°C, 5°C ... Meanwhile: widespread panic over a fucking virus that will probably kill far fewer people than malaria each year. But the virus is killing (also) white people, not (mostly) in Africa, or India.

It scares me. It scares me when I look at what people (even the supposedly radical left) are willing to accept uncritically when fear gets into people: the army on the streets, 100,000 complaints (fines) for disobeying the State of Alert, us, the "offenders" as new enemies. Where is the critical thinking?

It scares me, thinking about the collapse of this industrial civilization that is coming no matter what. Fear of ecofascism, of authoritarian, racist responses. The European Union has already closed its borders to a virus. Desperate immigrants are of no interest to anyone. They would be better off dying in the attempt to reach our Fortress Europe, and if not, in the refugee camps.

I am afraid, and I feel helpless. Despair. I have no hope anymore.