VI. The Pandemic Diaries, Continued
In the state of generic life chaos, I try to remain calm. I don’t think I have to move yet.
Monday, March 16th: I am watching a lot of my Singaporean friends in other colleges (via social media) in the U.S. pack up and go home. People are fleeing the U.S. for the safety of Singapore, where the virus situation is currently more under control and citizens are guaranteed access to healthcare. My Singaporean friends at U-M are either making arrangements to leave Ann Arbor for Singapore within the week, or are considering it. My roommate and I are kind of in limbo, but neither of us really want to leave. I think I’m sort of in denial. It doesn’t feel real that my senior year is ending like this. It’s all just happened too fast.
But that evening, my roommate, Laura, gets a phone call from Singapore. Both of us have government jobs in Singapore lined up after graduation, herself in defence, and myself in education. We anticipated this.
“JAMIE!” Oh no.
Her employers in Singapore have recalled her. By recall, I mean that they are strongly encouraging us to make plans to return home.
“I’m pretty sure it’s only a matter of time before you get a call too.” She says.
“Ugh. You’re right.” The suspense is awful.
I go into panic mode packing. I cannot stand the feeling of limbo; the feeling of possibly having to leave yet being so rooted here by my stuff is killing me. I want to do something; at least if I pack I make some progress towards being more mobile.
Can you imagine the limbo of having your senior year abruptly end right after spring break?
Imagine having about a week’s notice to pack up your entire life and move across the globe by yourself, while worrying about pandemic precautions, changing travel bans and restrictions that update every hour, across two different time zones.
I don’t sleep the entire night. I pack and pack. I empty out all the storage crevices in my room and start filtering.
Toss this.
Keep that.
Do I need this?
Do I need that in the next few weeks?
Send it home?
Give it away?
Pack it.
At the end of the night I have one full suitcase, a pile of things to keep and pack somewhere, and a pile of random things to discard, donate or give away. It’s one of the few all-nighters I’ve ever pulled in college and this is far from being for academic purposes.
Who could even think about academics at this point? I can barely bring myself to give a shit about school when I don’t even know whether I will be in this country in a few days.
On one hand, there is a major sense of relief. I feel a bit better knowing how much I can pack and declutter in the course of one night. I feel a slight catharsis from clearing out a bunch of junk from my room. I feel… a little lighter, so to speak. My room has a bit more space. I go to bed at 9am.
Tuesday March 17th: I get a recall email from my employers in Singapore, strongly encouraging me to return home. I can’t figure out whether I should stay or go. I don’t want to leave. I want to continue taking classes on the same time zone my university runs on. I want to have time to collect myself from all this chaos. I haven’t caught up to the whirlwind. I need to pack and packing is stressful. Especially when you’re moving across the globe.
Wednesday March 18th: I get on another phone call with my parents and this does not go well. I lay out my reasoning for wanting to stay - I have a lot of good reasons to. But they are worried and do not trust the healthcare system in the U.S., nor the volatile political situation. It gets rather heated and it ends in tears for me because they will not listen to me. I am angry and upset and stressed. In the midst of all this uncontrollable chaos, I am now having my autonomy over where I choose to geographically locate myself in this world tugged away from me.
It’s not just my autonomy that is being tugged away from me. It’s also my networks, my stability, and everything I relied on to establish my sense of self in this world. Many of my friends have moved home, and I had to say many rushed goodbyes, goodbyes that I would never have been fully ready to say but to say them now, in the midst of all this, is even harder and even more unanticipated. I feel like a sailor on a ship without a compass, in the midst of a dark night on the ocean, . I have been relying on the stars to navigate but suddenly, inky clouds have swept across all the constellations and I am lost. I don’t know where I am relative to anywhere and I don’t know where I’m going. The currents move me, but I don’t know in what direction.
Monday March 23rd: Michigan’s governor Gretchen Whitmer issues a shelter-in-place executive order effective until April 13th. Laura and I keep up with news of tightening border restrictions being implemented in Singapore to stem the spike of COVID-19 cases that have arisen from the diaspora returning home to shelter from the pandemic situation in countries like the U.S.. Our friend has been rapidly ordered to return home with barely a few days notice, and we have received news that flights from the U.S. to Singapore are potentially being grounded for the month of April. People are telling us, go now, or be prepared to wait.
Laura and I spend the entire day packing.
I’d say that the end of it is that most of my belongings are now either confined to the donate/discard/give away pile, packed into suitcases ready to be checked in, or sealed in boxes and posted home, or else they are the daily things I need to live right now. I have my toiletries, school materials, speaker, comfy home clothes, some workout gear. Not much else. My room is incredibly empty. It is bare, because I’ve taken down the eclectic decor that makes my room so characteristic. I used to have posters, art, and hanging decor all over my room, and now they’re gone.
I guess the COVID-19 limbo has forced me to live at my most peak minimalist; as minimalist as someone like me gets in my lifetime. My mother, who has all my life nagged me for being cluttered and having too much stuff, would be proud to see my room now. My room and closet are super empty. Everything out is highly utilized and essential. There’s not much stuff taking up storage space; there’s not much dead space used for storage of miscellaneous items I don’t use very often.
In a way, it helps me function well and cope a little better. Having less stuff is easier: I feel more mobile, I feel like I can breathe, less stressed by clutter and I can move anytime if I need to. I have the space to clear the room for a home workout, or just enjoy the space.
But the caveats! These are not normal circumstances. I require less “daily life stuff” now because I’m mostly at home. Before the COVID-19 madness, I usually occupied and was immersed deeply in three different social roles regularly: 1. College student. I had to have books, stationery, readings, folders and electronic learning materials. 2. Student teacher at a middle school. I had to have professional wear, music sheets, lesson plans, various musical instruments and teaching tools. 3. Collegiate recreational athlete. I had to have my Taekwondo uniforms, sparring gear, athletic wear and workout tools. These three social roles all have different requirements that require different sets of stuff.
But now I only occupy one—quarantined. Quarantine life is way lower maintenance. I can stay in my pajamas all day, I don’t need much more than my laptop and occasionally some paper. Three life spaces are reduced to one. I’m also about to transition to another completely different life space as I graduate, move to another country and culture, and enter the workforce there. So when I look at my ‘minimalist’ room and lifestyle now and see how easy it is, I wonder: Can I keep this up? Most of my stuff is packed away temporarily—especially the sentimental, or the occasional. I still need them for sure! I just have settled for a more minimalist lifestyle to tide me through this temporary chaos. Can I permanently do this? Perhaps but no, I don't think so. Minimalism for now provides a temporary means to help cope with the limbo and uncertainty.
Being in constant limbo, however, is incredibly stressful. Having an empty room reduces that stress a little. I imagine that if I had to move, I could. But I feel that my empty room also kind of reflects my empty life in the shelter-in-place era. No college classes, no middle school teaching, no Taekwondo, no gym, and no social life because social distancing is the new norm! What if we thought about minimalism beyond the material and considered more invisible forms of minimalism?
Social distancing - the new rule of COVID-19 life. It is key to flattening the curve and buying overstrained healthcare systems time to cope with the pandemic. I am in full support of it and do believe it necessary, but I can’t help but reflect on what this means for us - a kind of forced social minimalism in a way. We stay home from school and work, and forcibly distance ourselves from our friends, family, servers in restaurants, shops we patronize and any from any interaction deemed “non-essential”. In-person interactions have been moved to online interactions, all gatherings cancelled. Every time I see a friend, I have to take the opportunity to say a real goodbye. I don’t know when they or I will leave town, and when we part, we part for a long time because I am graduating.
Goodbyes hold a stronger finality, but they possess even more uncertainty in these unstable times. I have to become even more selective of who I hang out with because of social distancing. If I am going to use my quota of social seeing to see someone, I have to use it on people who matter the most. Now with social distancing in place, I am more conscious of what relationships mean more to me, which ones I treasure and want right next to me. I sorely miss what has been suddenly ripped from me. It makes me think about my own forced material minimalism: I deepen my awareness of what objects I use all the time, but in a way, do I use those more because the alternatives have been packed away? Do I appreciate my relationships more now that a lot of social avenues have suddenly been lost? I host a birthday party via Zoom, a few of us hang out via BlueJeans. My friends and I do movie nights via a Google Chrome extension called Netflix party. We are making do.
But the video calls are exhausting. I couldn’t figure out why, until a friend send me this tweet by Gianpiero Petriglieri that said this:
“I spoke to an old therapist friend today, and finally understood why everyone’s so exhausted after the video calls. It’s the plausible deniability of each other’s absence. Our minds tricked into the idea of being together when our bodies feel we’re not. Dissonance is exhausting.”
Our social contact has been reduced to the bare minimum. Don’t meet anyone beyond your household unless for essential purposes, like the grocery store, or for care-taking. It gives “essential” a whole new meaning. To me, social minimalism is where the ‘only need the essentials’ argument breaks down. Sure, I can survive in quarantine without hanging out with my friends, but it’s a miserable life. I miss sharing physical space with the people I love. I miss being able to read body language, to see the way someone shifts their weight, or leans closer for support or a hug. Yes, we can survive with just the ‘essentials’, but is it a good life? Tell me, who really likes this whole social distancing thing?
How then do we define ‘essential’? Is essential just the bare minimum for survival? Or is the thriving of the human condition considered an essential to life?
Digital connection has become ever so much more important now in this time of social distancing. We rely on e-mail, Canvas, BlueJeans, Zoom, and GoogleDocs to keep remote learning going. We rely on social media, text, phone calls and other ways to stay socially connected. We rely on the internet to stay up to date on the news. It’s a constant deluge. It’s this notification, that notification. Do this for class! Reply to X and Y about how you’re doing! Check up on A and B! Oh no, what’s the latest information on shelter-in-place? Are we in lockdown yet? Am I able to leave the country? What’s the quarantine policy in Singapore now?
Every ping on my phone makes me flinch now. I worry that it’s a text from my parents yelling at me to come home. I fear that one of my friends has COVID-19. I shudder to think about emails from professors wondering why I am not keeping up. I am so afraid of recall notifications from my employers in Singapore. I don’t want to read the news because it stresses me out, but it is everywhere. Every bit of news about COVID-19 causes my anxiety levels to spike, but the news is all over the place and is all anyone talks about. Which is fair, it is the most pressing issue of our time. However, the stream of news is constant. I wake up at 9am to worried texts from Singapore, sending me links of the high case numbers in Michigan, the poor White House handling, the lockdowns in California, the hate crimes against Asians in NYC, and people worrying for my safety and healthcare. I respond to it all, and try not to worry about getting infected, having to evacuate, or having to fear for my safety as an Asian woman. The activity dies down around noon as the morning news quiets and Singapore goes to sleep. There is peace till about 7pm, peace in which I try to get work done and stay somewhat active (an athlete in quarantine goes stir crazy really easily). But at 7pm, Singapore wakes up again, and the deluge continues.
It is at this point I start considering the Silicon Valley trend of digital minimalism or the digital sabbath, to just unplug and take a break from social media and any news updates. Unplug and go away. Yet, how can I afford to do that in these times? With how unstable the situation is and the constant updates that come every hour, how can I afford to not be informed? How can I afford to not be contactable? How can I risk not being connected to the news of whether there will be lockdowns, or if I have to evacuate before flights get grounded? On one hand, the digital maximalism of staying in touch is stressful, but I can’t afford to unplug right now. How do you strike that balance?
Moreover, if you consider the crucial role digital connection plays in this era of social distancing, things get even more complicated. I feel that in these anxious times, we crave support and connection even more. People can be quick to demonize technology, digital connection and media addiction, but as an international student who has been relying on digital connections to stay in touch with family and friends back home for the past 3 years, I’d say digital connections are crucial. In this era of social distancing, I’d say we need digital connection even more. My friends and I have been able to support each other using resources like Zoom, BlueJeans, FaceBook, video chats, various messaging platforms and more when we can’t physically be together. We still crave that emotional, spiritual connection and community. In a way, this forced social minimalism has exposed how hard it is to be digitally minimalist, unless you’re a complete anti-social hermit. (Which is all fine, you do you, but I’m an extrovert.)
The stress of constant updates stands toe to toe with the refuge of connection.
But what if our place of refuge is haunted by the shadows of what we miss but cannot have?
How do we manage the complications of a connection that simultaneously offers a semblance of presence, yet deep down, only reminds us of absence?