The Pandemic Has Been a Portal (for a few of us)

It's true that most people keep choosing "normalcy". But the COVID conscious community is showing us a radical new way forward, that centers care

Arundhati Roy has long been one of my favorite and most admired writers. In Spring 2020 she wrote a stunning essay about COVID, The Pandemic is a Portal, which you can read in full here. But I’ll draw your attention to these paragraphs:

Whatever it is, coronavirus has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could. Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to “normality”, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality.

Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.

We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.

As ever, Arundhati observed the bigger picture incisively, correctly sensing in early April of 2020 that a “return to normal” would present a missed opportunity for needed, radical change.

Her language - “refusing to acknowledge the rupture”- seems almost mild compared to what ended up happening. Most people refuse to even speak the word COVID. When they get sick, they do not test for COVID. When they get COVID-like symptoms, they claim to have the flu in the middle of summer, or, even stranger, they post videos inquiring “is there something going around??” People who engage in COVID mitigation practices are mocked, harassed, and accused of being mentally ill.

Art avoids the pandemic, to the point that it’s odd- as if all TV shows, books and movies take place in an alternate universe where COVID never happened.

Memories of the part of the pandemic that people acknowledge (2020-2022ish) are retconned to fit right-wing narratives. Many people now seem to believe that more teachers and workers should’ve been socially murdered to accommodate Republican demands to reopen before vaccines. This has to do, most likely, with the political and social normalization of social murder over the past five years, to the point where no one blinks at telling a disabled person to stay home indefinitely or die when they express that COVID must be mitigated because COVID is deadly for them.

In other words, prejudices were dragged. Hatreds were dragged. And carcasses? Yes, we’ve got plenty of them, too.

Life for a few of us, though, has radically changed since 2020. And as difficult as that change has been, I believe it is a function of our attempt to travel through this portal Roy described as a small group, without as much community support as we need.

I’ll clarify something before I continue. In 2023, I developed Long COVID, and in 2024 my condition became severe. I am now homebound. However, the “portal” I feel I travelled through would be the one I choose to enter when I began masking again during Omicron wave one, in late 2021-early 2022. So I’m going to speak a bit about my experiences being COVID safe, in the COVID safe community, from both sides of the Long COVID divide.

But I’ll start before any of that. Way before.

After college, I spent several years working in international public health. I became disillusioned with the work, as I found that our USAID and Gates Foundation contracts were not addressing the heart of the issues afflicting my assigned regions in Sub-Saharan Africa. Giving out mosquito nets and TB medication was all well and good, but these people needed more money, I began to realize, and the US was part of a system that impoverished the Global South. Why was Bill Gates, unelected by anybody anywhere, setting health policy in countries all over the world? Just because he was rich? A major influence on my thinking at this time was none other than Arundhati Roy.

I picked up her book Capitalism: A Ghost Story on a grey, overcast day at a local lefty bookstore/coffee shop one afternoon. It was a slim little volume; I had just ducked in from the drizzling rain for an Americano, and saw it propped up by the cash register. I remembered liking her novel (at the time, her only one), The God of Small Things, in high school, so I bought it on a whim. But wow, that book. Soon after, I moved on to The End of Imagination, and then I hungrily consumed everything else she’d ever written. I learned more about neoliberalism, corporate power, displacement, indigenous land rights, NGOization, privatization, I could go on. I felt like she taught me something new on every page.

I began to think of myself as “a tiger on a leash”- her descriptor for young activists who are recruited into liberal think tank and NGO work, keeping them safely away from radical spaces and ideas.

But what to do with what I now knew? At first, I simply felt overwhelmed.

I began cutting out of work more, drinking more. I spent a lot of my 20s partying, getting lost in hedonism because the world felt hopeless, self-medicating before finally medicating-medicating. I left my office job for bartending, which I did, semi-happily, for years. Finally in 2015, I got excited about Bernie Sanders’ run for President and got an entry-level job as an organizer for his campaign out in Nevada. From there I began doing more political work. Was this my answer- was this how I could feel engaged, useful in the world?

For a while, it was. And then, it wasn’t.

I loved organizing. I loved the people I met and the work I did. But the change that could be effected within the system felt limited - even Bernie himself often speaks to the reality that organizing shouldn’t be something that occurs only around elections and election cycles. And then- COVID. In 2020, liberals and progressives made space for disabled people to continue to be part of organizing, to co-exist with the realities of a virus that we simply can’t be in a room with. By 2022, those options were disappearing. By 2024, they were a rare exception.

This trajectory broke my heart, repeatedly. I knew back in 2022 that if I ever caught COVID, I’d be likely to develop Long COVID due to my underlying conditions. In late 2023, I caught COVID, and by mid 2024, I became homebound with severe Long COVID. The message I received, loudly and clearly, from my former “home” in progressive politics was quite simply: That does not matter. My health does not matter. My life does not matter. I do not matter. Try continuing to advocate for a movement that believes these things. Try believing such a movement is radical.

However, in 2022 as I realized no, vaccines would not be preventing infection, that no, breakthrough infections were not rare, that yes, vaccinated people could go on to have serious outcomes including death and debility, and that yes, Long COVID was very real and very scary, there were people who did still care. These were people who advocated for mitigations, loudly and clearly, who masked in public spaces, who organized mask distributions, who shared mutual aid, and held mask-required events.

As most people allowed themselves to be swept, gently and surely, back into the waiting arms of self-centered individualism for the sake of consumerism and capitalism, a few brave people firmly refused to be gaslit by the state into accepting a “new normal” that was observably, objectively, objectionably worse than the normal we’d already been suffering under.

They quite simply said, “no, I’m not going to accept that you’re making things even worse for the most vulnerable. I’m going to do something.”

And they’ve been doing something! Every day since!

It seems we get so few opportunities to do things that can meaningfully help one another. Every day I have to scroll past so many mutual aid requests that I can’t give to, because I simply don’t have the money to contribute to them all. But when I leave home (unfortunately, very rarely now), I can always put on a mask. I can always guarantee that I’m not going to infect someone, disable, or kill them, be responsible for them losing their livelihood, home, partner, be responsible for them ending up like me, trapped indefinitely in their one-bedroom apartment.

That doesn’t mean I never find masking annoying, or that I mean to say that masking for a few hours here and there would be the equivalent of masking at a public-facing full-time job. Like most maskers, I advocate for comprehensive clean air upgrades that would ultimately drastically reduce the risk of catching airborne illnesses in public spaces, and reduce the burden on individuals. But I also feel sad that people who spend so much time reading leftist theory cannot spot an opportunity to directly care for others when it is staring them in the face, and instead continue to participate in harming others while said others beg them to stop.

But this article isn’t about them, it’s about those who have walked through the portal, and what life is like over here.

Well, I won’t sugarcoat it. Lonely. So many of our comrades chose not to come with us, that yes, it is lonely. The biggest downside of masking and practicing COVID safety is the social opprobrium we receive, born on the right wing, tolerated and then advanced across the political spectrum. This social rejection and stigma is no mystery, no accident; it is a meticulously constructed psychological project intended to shoo people back to the capitalist, individualist “normal” Roy referred to in her 2020 essay. Walking through that portal must come with a social cost, the public must be chastised away from preaching any doctrine of community above oneself. Only weirdos walk away from (gestures broadly) alllllll this.

It’s also scary. I’ve already been disabled by one COVID infection, and cannot afford another. Imagine being so harmed by an infection that everyone around you refers to as harmless that you can’t walk more than 500 steps a day. Imagine you have to plan your week around taking a shower (sitting down). Imagine that you know what getting worse looks like- and it’s your friends who can’t get out of bed anymore at all. And as you suffer through all of this, people continue to call the virus that did this to you a “cold”, refuse to test for it, refuse to wear masks, act like it’s their God-given right to spread it, and even act like you’ve slapped them if you suggest that it’s not.

But what else is it? Living on the other side of the portal? You’re now outside of “normal” entirely. You’ve been cut out of “society” which comes with many negatives- but maybe a few positives? Your friends are COVID safe people, many of them disabled. You cannot participate in social events where people ignore disability justice. You’ve had to build a parallel world, this new, tiny little world through the portal. Freeing. New. Stripped down. Real. Lacking artifice. Lacking distraction.

On the other side of the portal, we often bemoan learning how many people truly do not care about our health. But we also learned who truly does care, or met people who do. We have this knowledge now, knowledge we never would otherwise have had. Transactional people and relationships are long gone. The people around us are trustworthy, because they have to be.

If we didn’t know it before, we learned that socializing doesn’t actually have to revolve around spending money on restaurants, make-up, outfits, or any sort of conspicuous consumption. Those things are and can be nice treats, but they aren’t necessary to relationships, love and care. In fact, as I sit in my one-bedroom apartment with my handful of girlfriends these days- the only place I’m well enough to see them anymore- I often think of these lines from The Grinch:

And the Grinch, with his Grinch-feet ice cold in the snow, stood puzzling and puzzling, how could it be so? It came without ribbons. It came without tags. It came without packages, boxes or bags. And he puzzled and puzzled 'till his puzzler was sore. Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn't before. What if Christmas, he thought, doesn't come from a store. What if Christmas, perhaps, means a little bit more.

When I constantly see leftists bemoan the idea of COVID precautions because indoor dining, I think, what if community, perhaps, means a little bit more.

I do think there is just one group of people who’ve walked through the pandemic portal with little luggage. It is those of us in our N95 or KN95 masks and air purifiers, our up-to-the-minute Nature studies, our hand-drawn Zines and our mask-required poetry readings and our dance parties and our distro events. It is those of us who left behind so much else. It is those of us who were asked, how many lives would you trade for indoor dining and said, well, I guess zero. Those of us who were asked, how long will you care for your neighbor and said, I always will. Those of us who were told, you don’t have to love anyone, not anymore, and said, that’s what makes me a radical.

The pandemic has been a portal, for me, for many others. It still is. Come find us here.