A Little Scary, but a Lot Beautiful
Photograph by Jailli
In isolation, I spent a great deal of time napping. I listened to rain sounds on Spotify a lot and baked scores of cookies, eyes glazed in an almost resolute fashion, brain on autopilot as my hands poured, mixed and measured. I wrote almost nothing of value, read too little, and––for some strange and inexplicable reason––adopted a habit of playing Slither.io until the wee hours of the morning. I think that it is safe to say that I put a pause on doing for a while; that most of me was too preoccupied with the simple occupation of being, existing hazily from day to day, to achieve too much.
What I did achieve, however, was lots and LOTS and lots of thinking. I thought about this stupid virus––what it means for all the people that I know, and for the many billions that I do not. I tried to comprehend the devastation that was being felt around the world, financially, physically and emotionally. Thought about the injustice of a whole planet of people hurting as a result of something that they cannot control. I ruminated on the past––dwelled on repressed truths in need of unearthing, and reminisced about happy times, golden memories that live within gleaming, uncorrupted bubbles in my mind. It is also important that I mention, amongst the poignant and profound, the great many hours I spent thinking about my boyfriend––a number that would probably appal my astute and quick-witted English teachers and provoke the rolling of my mother’s eyes. For him and I, though, COVID-19 meant 96 days apart; days that ebbed with no great hurry, dragging their feet like a weary child. Although I was grateful for my safety and the overwhelming privilege of total comfort during this period, I did spend a lot of time indulging in selfish feelings of bitterness––I resented the distance between us, and I abhorred the pandemic for rendering us powerless to close it.
Most of all, though, I thought about the future. I dedicated many minutes to contemplating the world that lays in front of us, shattered in pieces, and the way in which we as a generation will go about sticking them back together. I envisioned a bunch of tired looking teenagers standing around awkwardly, making tentative, anxious conversation and chewing gum. I imagined them using the greyed, gluey wads in an attempt to reassemble the fractured chunks of humanity, all wearing expressions of sadness intertwined with disgust as they are presented with the world laid bare. Will we have the resources, or the strength? Or are we all going to be too busy listening to Lana Del Rey under our coloured LED lights and feeling a doomed sort of melancholy to do anything about it?
To be honest, I think that kids of Gen Z drew the short straw. We (as Westerners endowed with immense privilege, that is) are not living through a world war or global famine, but we are being confronted with a time of immense change. It’s impossible to focus on drivers licenses or exams or drunken nights, on normal elements of youth, while adults around us sit on their hands, leaving people and our planet for dead in the name of “preserving the economy.” When watching the news, one has two options: feel everything on a level that, after a while, will slowly destroy you, or dissociate completely in an attempt at self-protection. Most people from our age group tend to go for the golden medium––we will conduct ourselves in a seemingly normal fashion until cracks begin to show, at which point the dam begins to break and out flows a torrential stream of earnest and wholehearted angst and profound feelings of dread. Student debt and job insecurity, homophobia, racism, misogyny and toxic masculinity. Fear of falling short of what is expected, and of not living up to self-imposed standards. Buying a house is out of the question. We’ll be lucky to be able to afford the rent at a studio apartment. If we’re not successful by the time we’re twenty-five, what even is the point? We are struggling under — being smothered by — the weight of endless pressure; the pressure of existing within a system that was built to fall apart, to sink like the Titanic and create a giant vacuum designed to swallow and drown the disenfranchised, while those at the top of the food chain simply refuse to acknowledge the inevitable until they’re swallowed up, too.
However, contrary to what that grievously depressing paragraph you just read suggests, I do have hope for the future, and I think you should too. The world as we know it is, I have no doubt, folding in on itself, but it begs the question: is that such a bad thing? Our world is run by men with fat pockets and small hearts…is it really so terrible if their ship is sinking? Maybe we don’t know how to exist in a world without this given structure yet, but it’s important that we keep this in mind: the collapse of a system does not equate to the termination of the messy and beautiful thing that is human nature. We can still love and feel and learn and dream, and I’m excited to do all of those things, possibly in that order. I can’t wait to see the Swiss Alps with my own two eyes. I want to breathe the fresh, clear mountain air, the kind that makes your lungs feel like they’re having a shower. I want to stay in kitschy European motels with colourful walls and antique mirrors, walk down the streets of Malta in a sundress holding the hands of the person I love. I crave sunsets and oceans and endless open-windowed highway drives with music turned up to the max; I want to slow dance and kiss and cry; I want to live a whole big life that isn’t stifled by the constraints of capitalism and patriarchy. One day I’m going to retire in a cottage on a grassy hill and grow tulips and own several pet bunnies with names like Mabel and Alice, and absolutely nobody is going to stop me. I refuse to assimilate my personal feelings of worth and self-satisfaction to the ones that society imposes on me. I AM NOT A SERIES OF NUMBERS, AND I AM NOT A MEANS TO AN END! And neither are you. We are beings independent from the church and from the state, with complete agency over the lives that we live. Isn’t that a little scary, but a lot beautiful?