When you have been built for the times

I've been thinking a lot these past few weeks about the very human need for closure. For a new chapter to begin, even when it's not clear at all the old one has ended.

I witnessed a flood of virtual postings of celebration and joy last Saturday, when it appeared as if we had definitively elected a new President. And yet, for many of those friends and acquaintances, the foreboding is creeping in.

For a lot of people, 2020 feels like the boiling frog experiment. A viral pandemic, economic hardship, what more can the year bring? 

I feel like some of my ability to not completely fall apart in the fear and unsettledness is based in my own journey through hell. The six years I spent conceiving and losing babies sometimes feels like a lifetime ago. Sometimes I worry about how disconnected I am to the grief of those losses, like, am I no longer honoring my babies since moving on? (the answer to that question is of fucking course, no, I'm just taking you through the roads of my brain).

But then it's moments in the dark, in the insomnia and in the uncertainty and unknown of it all that I'm brought right back. Yessss, I know what this feels like. I know what social isolation without any tether to a human who isn't a screen name feel like. 2020 is oh so familiar because I have lived 2020. It's just that 2020 was six years.

Part of the horror of losing Celine was that *she* was supposed to live. If anyone had attempted to write the story of a woman who experienced a partial molar pregnancy, Asherman's, multiple additional miscarriages and was written off by a slew of REs, only to find herself with a genetically healthy baby, they would write this particular story to end with the birth of Celine. A beautiful baby, the living embodiment of one woman who beat the odds.

But that was not the story that was written. And for this reason, I feel deep empathy for my friends who look at this year as something that must automatically come to a closure with celebration, with renewal and hope. And I hold my tongue with my nagging fears, with the worry that there is actually no bottom to what bad things look like. We impose order and rationale to a world filled with chaos and by extension - injustice - because we have to in order to function and get through the day. 

We are all sort of feeling as if we're the frogs in the pot right now, aren't we?