It seems like every day something new and horrible eclipses something else that is still horrible, but slightly less new. I can’t keep track of a pandemic, a sick president, a supreme court nominee fight, California wildfires, presidential debates, white supremacist militias, and kidnapping plots on top of work, home remodeling, and life. Everything is overwhelming.
I have the next chapter in the book I’m writing planned out. I know where it’s going, but the characters won’t talk to me. I try to go into my brain space, where the characters live, and converse and they’re oddly still. It’s almost as if they, in each of there existential crises, is sitting glued to the TV set watching the real crisis unfold.
It reminds me, in a twisted way, of 9/11. Not to minimize any of the lives lost on that day, but then too we were glued to our TV sets, watching the desperate search for the bodies. It consumed every waking moment. What’s different is then we had hope that by some miracle they’d find someone in the rubble who would get to go home. 210,000 people have died since March. 70 times the number who died on 9/11. There are a few miracles – someone comes home after 70 days in the ICU or makes it off the ventilator. But it’s overshadowed by so much death. And while the pandemic is present in every waking moment, we’ve become complacent to it.
The world is laughing at us. They’re laughing at our response and the shameless politicization of public health directives meant to keep us well. They’re laughing at a president who doesn’t understand the science proclaiming himself to be the cure. Other leaders understand what needs to happen to mitigate the spread. They grieve for the families of the deceased and of the long-haulers who are still sick months after contracting COVID. Instead, our president wants to hold rallies while still infected, with no words of sympathy for those suffering.
With chaos raging around me, all of my creative juices are tapped out. I’m just surviving; living as best I can in this dystopian hellscape. I couldn’t write this. And even if I did, no editor would publish it because it would be too far-fetched. My characters wouldn’t stand for it either. They would be fighting, hard, to make things right, to bring back compassion and justice. They’d be part of the underground resistance, standing up for what they believe it. Now, they are just surviving too, frozen in time.
I hope that some day soon I can thaw my characters and bring them to life again – pull them out from in front of their TVs. But until then, I refuse to succumb to the chaos. There’s only one choice left for me to make, as the world burns around me. I have to fight. I have to make my voice heard. I have to be the resistance.
So that my characters, and my unborn children, can have a better future.
The Connecticut Writers' Circle 