i fucking hate this tweet because no the fuck i do not remember this era of quarantine and neither do a lot of people lmao like some of us have mental/physical disabilities that were exacerbated by lockdown or were forced to continue working…you will not catch me reminiscing for a single second for the year 2020
on the one hand, yes
on the other... we’re now in a position where the pandemic has not gone away, where everyone is expected to have returned to work and be happy capitalist cannonfodder pretending it isn’t happening, where in England there will apparently be no restrictions from the end of February (??????????)
Everyone who started this with mental/physicasl disabilities is still in the same boat, but being told again and again by the prevailing culture that their lives don’t matter, that lifting restrictions is more than worth the cost of their lives.
And it’s all late capitalism at it’s fucking fucked up best. People are the cheapest commodity to replace, and now everyone - even people who weren’t fully aware of it before - everyone has to know they are worth less than an imaginary number. And we’re expected to be happy to “return to society” even though lots of us aren’t doing that, we’re expected to function normally as if we aren’t still living through an ongoing trauma, and we’re expected to smile and make them money and forget the ways we realised capitalism was broken to begin with.
Honestly, I don’t blame people for preferring 2020 to now. Early 2020 was horrifying and terrifying and isolating, but a lot of the markers of daily capitalism stopped for a lot of people. Now we have the terror, combined with the weight of two fucking years of this shit. Should we romance it? fuck no. But I can almost see how you would, how it feels markedly better than this constant gaslighting and belittlling.
Idk folks. In March 2020 I was terrified and anxious, I missed all my friends and I thought our society might end. Now I’m tired and burned out and depressed in whole new ways I hadn’t imagined being, carrying round the dead weight of dread; I can’t imagine it changing any more, and I still can’t be with the people I love.
