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loveinthetimeoflongcovid · 3 years

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ciao love + happy new year

10.01.22

thank you for your patience in waiting for an overdue reply from me. I won’t say sorry, because I’m trying to apologise less for things that are harder for me to do because my body and mind make it so, in this case, productivity… but I do want to say that this writing project is in my mind every day! and I am cherishing it / being nourished by it even when I am not directly messaging you about it.

all my daily and new thoughts re: covid, the pandemic, are passed through the filter of ‘what will nazmia think about this’?… ‘what’s her take, what will her bountiful knowledge throw up as insight this time?’

my first entry of 2022 comes in a week that has been particularly hard, from a month that has also been especially hard. christmas was an overly needed and welcome slow-down of the world around me. it was just me and my mum this year, and it was slow cooker vibes. I didn’t realise until christmas was over (and I got really sad lol) that it meant everything slowed down to my speed. I finally felt on an equal participation level with people around me, whether it was my mum just in the house slowing down and spending more time with me, or people’s acceptance that text back times will be slow, online engagement being lower and slower, that all things would be trundling along slowly. at my pace! and at the happiest(?) season? gorgeous!

the transition out of that slow period, feeling people speed up again, has been sad. it also coincided with my body crashing out for ten days after helping cook christmas dinner. but frankly the sprouts that I knocked out were prestigious, so am happy to take the L.

but then the distraction of christmas passed, and I was reminded of all the eugenicist shit that omicron’s hyper spread brought out of people in the weeks leading up to it. I’m interested to know your thoughts on what you were seeing (if anything) around then… in the days before christmas, there was a fleeting embrace of ‘fuck you and your fear-mongering this gets us nowhere let people live this time has been so hard’, where I think excitement/relief of christmas/having-a-break brought out the nastiest individualist shit in people. it died down (a bit, not entirely) after christmas, which I’m glad to have seen, because it was making me feel quite fatalist about where we were heading, particularly in ‘left’ communities.

something I have also seeing frequently (online) are comparisons to HIV/AIDS pandemic in regard to how we talk about behaviour. there a few accounts on twitter, who compared a lot actually, but in ways that I found confusingly devoid of community-based/community-led responses to HIV/AIDS. some thoughts I’ve been having, grateful for yours, particularly as you’ve had this in your brain space for a bit now(!):

comparisons on how we teach/practice/talk about safe behaviour have limitations when comparing the two pandemics: covid is airborne, more transmissible to more people (just because of its virological nature) and therefore the ‘reasonable’ expectations we can have on people’s behaviour change — I’ve seen arguments about ‘what we learnt during the HIV/AIDS pandemic is that shaming people and proscribing behaviours helps no-one’ — but at the same time…

‘silence = death’ was a big motto for a reason

we have far more advanced tech now and immunological + epidemiological knowledge of covid happened quicker than it did in the 80s

elements of behaviour deemed as ‘shaming’ during HIV/AIDS due to proximity w queer communities, queer sexuality, taboo w drug usage, sex work etc — don’t exist in the same ways with covid — and useful covid preventions like face masks, vaccines, ventilations for example, don’t interact with any of those positions to touch ‘shame’ in the same way

are there different things happening now with covid, when people react to an indoor party with low covid mitigations which increase likelihood of exposure/infection (and by extension disablement/death) for individuals and communities, to early days of HIV/AIDS when people were reacting to potential transmission which often would reach tensions around queer sexual expression / repression / queer community etc

all this thinking comes from a place of being highly critical of the state, seeing them as the root of maintaining the pandemic and simultaneously the potential architects of a way out (in a uk context but also understanding that as a cohesion of states globally), but also wondering what happens in the meantime. what do we do in the space where the state is not only failing us, but impoverishing us (spiritually, materially, existentially), disabling us and killing us…? what do we do in the space beyond critique of the state? who decides what is ‘reasonable’? and have people in reality broadly abandoned lived practices of community-led solutions/mitigations/responses in exchange for individual release / satisfaction?

BLAH BLAH BLAH

there are more things to say and to write about but they will have to wait, because now that I’ve reached the end of that list, my brain is goo. it feels like the static of a tv in my head. I did a collage earlier in 2021 of exactly the feeling, will upload here. also: I have not proofed this, if it is garbled I might add/edit later!

am buckled up for our 2022 tête-à-têtes and meanderings and am v grateful you welcomed me in on a project like this. it’s giving me lots. expect more volume from me in the coming weeks/months.

love + solidarity + rage

— loco x

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loveinthetimeoflongcovid · 3 years

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20.11.21

Hello lovely.

It is Saturday morning(ish) and I have just listened to your voice note. I am laughing a bit about the inability to retain anything and how you wonder what you said 5 minutes ago and I’m aware that in the time it took me to open the laptop and make a document I have lost a large amount of what I listened to. I’m going to say that this is part of the process.

I am writing this rather than making a voice note because I feel extremely foggy this morning and am even more worried than usual about my ability to make any sense. Plus this might work as a warm up for the essay I am meant to be writing which is about Sue O’Sullivan and Pratibha Parmar’s 1992 pamphlet ‘Lesbians Talk (Safer) Sex’. It is largely about AIDS and lesbians and there are some echoes there of your note - people not really knowing how things were going to develop with HIV or who it was affecting or why. Of course by 1992 they did know a bit more - ten years in - but what I really like about the pamphlet is that it considers practical ways that all dykes can act safely and with pleasure in the context of a killer virus that yes, does affect some lesbians because some lesbians have sex with men (because they like it and/or for work), some lesbians inject drugs and some lesbians are HIV positive for other reasons. There is a real sense that for the people writing the book, HIV should be the problem of everyone. This is very much like the (minority) voice now that says Covid 19 is something we all need to take into account in our daily lives. Just because you are unlikely to be affected, it doesn’t mean you won’t be.

What I am finding so terrifying about Covid, and what you talk about in your note, is the effects the virus leaves in the body. Long Covid. Should we be thinking about Covid as HIV and Long Covid as AIDS. I know we don’t use AIDS anymore and people die of HIV related illness, but isn’t that the way round we might need to start viewing things - Long Covid, the iceberg in the rising sea?

I don’t think this will make much sense as a coherent piece of writing today - but I wanted to make a start. I don’t think I have space in my brain to try and read medical language at all. As a way of trying to feel useful and part of this new place I live in and part of my old life, I am wrangling together the police intervention training for Wales (the Sisters taster session). It is just a powerpoint with a zoom call, most of it already done, volunteers have been found (and many more lost - no one is reliable any more and I can hardly blame them) … and yet it is feeling impossibly difficult to manage a simple training, a part time job, part time study. The fog gets worse when I try to do things I’ve committed to doing. Even so I am aware that I can manage a lot more than most - funny to feel lucky even with a constant sense of frustration at what feels impossible now.

I think I told you that my lock down started in January 2020 rather than March like most people. At some point that is probably what I want to write about - how my body had retained multiple historical traumas and I was short circuiting all over the place, was signed off and spent vast chunks of Jan/Feb alone. The week I was due to return to work was the week everything shut down. Going back to work is the only test of whether I was better or not that I could have used at that point and without it - because no one is better when you start teaching full time online from home during a pandemic - it has been impossible to get a handle on where I am at. Coupled with getting Covid immediately before lockdown, a big move, two new jobs… fucked if I know what is long covid, what is depression, what is age and what is just being tired. I am very tired. I do very little physically which has meant the random swellings and wipe outs have eased off, but I feel unwell in the soft spreading of my already soft spread of a sickly body. I’ve never really been one to access fat activism - mostly because of the uneasy awareness that illness mental and physical is the cause of my fat and I’ve never felt that thrilled to be ill… so I guess I have a long journey still to make around a lot of the things that feed into thinking about what long covid and care mean for me personally.

Two things, before I stop rambling for now:

One of the things you found in your research - that long covid might activate illnesses that you have had before. About a decade ago I had a mysterious autoimmune flare that stopped me getting out of bed; it was accompanied by a bout of erythema nodosum where hard, hot, painful, raised blotches appeared all over my legs. Normally this sort of thing happens to a person once and either never goes away or goes away and you would not get another flare. Last year I had another flare. The doctors were confused but helpful - in as far as they scanned my lungs to make sure no blotches had gotten in there - and then they shrugged their shoulders and moved on. People only get this once. I got it twice and couldn’t get up and downstairs some days.

Queer communities have a language for talking about illness and some historic frameworks for care that I think are what I want to think about more properly. Also how feminist (and especially queer feminist) expectations around ‘talking’ - CR groups, workshops, personal testimonies etc etc are useful in this murky place we find ourselves.

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