My old friend Jacques (it’s our friendship that’s old, not him) is a true storyteller who never retired from his humanism. He responded to my concerns this week by adding these balsamic words to his e-mail: “Make tenderness our landscape, silence our beach and gather the meaning of life from the presence and gaze of the other. That’s my definition of hope that you shouldn’t give up. »
Reading it, I remembered how all the contacts with these friends of our extended circle, this gaze of the other, have been stretched over the past two years.
The confinement and the pandemic (not to mention the curfews) will have limited the way we ventilate, drop off, meet spontaneously or not. We retreated behind our barricades.
The last time I left Jacques and Francine, last fall, I was lighter, full of their affection, of our exchange; it carried me for several days. In their house, there are children’s drawings everywhere, laughter that lingers, as if hope is growing in this fertile ground of imagination.
Online shopping has its limits when it comes to relieving immediate urges. And the faded rainbows at the windows quickly took on the appearance of naive promises in the anxiety-inducing azure.
In the dark night of this pandemic tunnel, the illuminated Jacques-Cartier Bridge became my rainbow, the one I gazed at for a long time from my window. My cat Léonie has qualified as the confidante of choice. We refined our exchanges, evolved together.
There have not only been painful moments during these 24 months, far from it, and the stories are not all alike depending on whether you are an artist, a cook, a nurse or a primary school teacher. We all came to appreciate better what we took for granted in light of the deprivations.
And still today, a war makes us relativize the real difficulties. Our little pandemic miseries seem quite futile in retrospect.
On the other hand, distress, anguish and anxiety never take leave. Microbiologist Karl Weiss predicted a return to normal in the summer of 2022… in 2020. No one can say the same with a war; neither when nor how.
I am
a dotted line
and all
crosses me
All in the same boat
I hate rides, they make me dizzy. And the cotton candy lifts my heart. But if I had to sum up these past two years, it would be: roller coaster (no pun intended). And my brain was like cotton candy.
We have protected our physical health at the expense of the other, mental health. We measured the importance of it gropingly, the SQDC and the SAQ as reinforcements for some, Netflix, Zoom, Discord and Sea of Thieves also, meditation, yoga or virtual dance for others.
For the teenagers, it was the test of death. According to a meta-analysis of 29 studies published last summer in JAMA Pediatrics25% of people aged 18 and under worldwide would have experienced high symptoms of depression, and 20%, high symptoms of anxiety.
The figures have thus doubled thanks to confinements, school closures and curfews.
My teenager held on, but at what cost? The cat served as a therapist (by the way, it costs less than a shrink, and he has no waiting list).
During the first confinement with my French lover and the teenager, I repeated that it could be worse, like an old scratched Bolduc 78-rpm. We had a roof, food, hot water and Internet. I was thinking of my grandparents, in the Gaspé, at the beginning of the last century. Another pair of sleeves.
And it was also for these teenagers who ended up in crisis in child psychiatry services, here as elsewhere. I fell back this week, in a copy of The Obs, on an article by the writer Emmanuel Carrère, who spent ten days in the child psychiatry department of the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital in Paris at the end of 2020.
This is one of the beautiful texts that I have read during this pandemic: “The confinement has driven normal people crazy, on the other hand it has rather calmed the crazy people. » […] “Either they didn’t realize anything because they are confined anyway and have no idea what is going on outside, or it did them good to realize that everyone was now confined as them. We observe the same phenomenon in times of war: everyone in the same boat. »
All these new patients, those whom the world as it is makes ill and whose illness is an appropriate response to the madness of the world, how to welcome them?
Psychiatry is the poor relation of medicine. If it doesn’t bleed, if it doesn’t intubate, if you don’t die from it, it doesn’t exist. You can always put demons to sleep with a pill; they are so scary.
Dancing with clogs
Staying light when everything seems so heavy is demanding. Not to sink, above all, my obsession. I have soul charge. My father sank, once upon a time. I grasped the path; a wire on which we dance in clogs.
My tribe has been of invaluable help for two years. I keep on my computer desk a photo of my troubadour frenchyshirtless with his electric guitar, on his hip, in the kitchen, during the first confinement.
The clock said 4:35 on the wall, and we didn’t really care about the time. Because nothing holds while everything is going to hell.
You can do yoga at 10 a.m. and play the piano at midnight. You can bake your “paindémie” and prepare your soy milk, like survivalists. We can walk creatively to ventilate the neurons. We can view Schitt’s Creek and Seinfeld without feeling guilty, doing karaoke on cheeky videos of French singers from the 1980s. We did all that. We did not sink. We remained flexible. We drank “mower juice” (my kale juice, said the French lover) and “gin’to” on Friday evenings. We did not sink. We had parties for two, in a thousand ways. We reinvented ourselves. Maybe we even looked crazy.
And we rowed. Like everyone. Perhaps less. We’ll never know. Because the inland oceans to cross are invisible. So we row in silence and we dance on Instagram.
And we are announcing a sixth wave. Or not…
And we still look at the Jacques-Cartier bridge, which has not moved, not sunk.